We live within such a tiny capsule of time yet it seems vast until death rudely makes it so insignificant.

He had sat numb, repeatedly questioning why his own tumble had been held on the same piton just before the Japanese leader had fallen and ripped it out. A day later he was his normal self again: an experience absorbed, shelved in his memory, understood and accepted, and left at that.

Clouds hid the peaks and only their flanks were visible beneath a murky ceiling.

My body isn’t designed for walking. It’s entirely the wrong shape. The legs are far too short and the whole trunk is shaped exactly to fit into seats and be carried comfortably to its destination, preferably by something fast and exciting, such as a sports car or a helicopter.

Life can deal you an amazing hand. Do you play it steady, bluff like crazy or go all in?

There is something about mountains that moves the soul. They arouse a powerful sense of spiritual awareness and a notion of our own transient and fragile mortality and our insignificant place in the universe. They have about them an ethereal, evocative addiction that I find impossible to resist. They are an infuriating and fascinating contradiction. Climbing rarely makes sense but nearly always feels right.

If you succeed with one dream... it’s not long before you’re conjuring up another, slightly harder, a bit more ambitious, a bit more dangerous.

He was still grinning, and his confidence was infectious. Who said one man can’t rescue another, I thought. We had changed from climbing to rescue, and the partnership had worked just as effectively. We hadn’t dwelt on the accident. There had been an element of uncertainty at first, but as soon as we had started to act positively everything had come together.

It's not surprising. But it's going to be weird not working all of those games.

We went back and forth and we could never get the details worked out.