"No man ever followed his genius till it misled him. Though the result were bodily weakness, yet perhaps no one can say that the consequences were to be regretted, for these were a life in conformity to higher principles. If the day and the night are such that you greet them with joy, and life emits a fragrance like flowers and sweet-scented herbs, is more elastic, more starry, more immortal — that is your success. All nature is your congratulation, and you have cause momentarily to bless yourself. The greatest gains and values are farthest from being appreciated. We easily come to doubt if they exist. We soon forget them. They are the highest reality. Perhaps the facts most astounding and most real are never communicated by man to man. The true harvest of my daily life is somewhat as intangible and indescribable as the tints of morning or evening. It is a little star-dust caught, a segment of the rainbow which I have clutched. (47)"

• McCandless had this highlighted in a book that was found with him. Most would infer from reading this, that he agreed with Thoreau's ideas.  He thought that his life should be lived with its focus on nature and that you should try to look beyond what you would ordinarily see and try to see the good in it.

"McCandless was thrilled to be on his way north, and he was relieved as well- relieved that he had again evaded the impending threat of human intimacy, of friendship, and all the messy emotional baggage that comes with it.  He had fled the claustrophobic confines of his family. (55)"

• McCandless thought that his life should be lived the way he wanted it without others influencing his decisions.  I order to avoid those influences he avoided having relationships with anyone. He was also afraid that the emotional aspects of those relationships would get in the way of his happiness.

     "Oh how one wishes sometimes to escape from the meaningless dullness of human eloquence, from all those sublime phrases, to take refuge in nature, apparently so inarticulate, or in the wordlessness of long, grinding labor, of sound sleep, of true music, or of a human understanding rendered speechless by emotion!         

     McCandless starred and bracketed the paragraph and circled 'refuge in nature' in black ink. 

     Next to 'And so it turned out that only a life similar to a life of those around us, merging with it without a ripple, is genuine life, and that an unshared happiness is not happiness. . .And this was most vexing of all.' he noted, 'HAPPINESS ONLY REAL WHEN SHARED.' (189)"

• When he started his trip, McCandless thought you should live with what you needed and avoided companionship.  He saw the relationships and emotions that most other people are accustomed to as unnecessary and and meaningless.  He thought that closeness with others was boring and that living on your own in nature was more exiting. Towards the end of his life he began to see that even if you have what you enjoy, which for him was nature, that it is more enjoyable if you have that companionship and someone to share it with.

"He also turned the tables and started lecturing the grandfatherly father about the shortcomings of his sedentary existence, urging the eighty-year-old to sell most of his belongings, and live on the road. (51)"

• McCandless thought that his life should be lived with only the things that you need and on the road.  He believed it would help help him and others to live a longer and more fulfilled life.  He believed this so strongly he even encouraged those around him to do the same.

"I am reborn. This is my dawn. Real life has just begun. Deliberate Living: Conscious attention to the basics of life, and a constant attention to your immediate environment and its concerns, example- A job, a task, a book; anything requiring efficient concentration (Circumstance has no value. It is how one relates to a situation that has no value. All true meaning resides in the personal relationship to a phenomenon, what it means to you)."

• McCandless thought his life should be lived as simple as possible with its main focus on what is happening at the moment. Thoreau like Mccandless thought your attention should be on the basics of life.  

"The boy made some mistakes on the Stampede Trail, but confusing a caribou with a moose wasn't among them. (178)"

• Krakauer thought that McCandles had made some mistakes on his trip because he ended up dead at the end of it, but this quote also shows that he also thought he did many things correctly and for the most part knew what he was doing.

"Nor was McCandless endowed with a surfeit of common sense. Many who knew him have commented, unbidden, that he seemed to have great difficulty seeing the trees, as it were, for the forest. 'Alex wasn’t a total space cadet or anything,' says Westerberg; 'don’t get me wrong. But there was gaps in his thinking. I remember once I went over to the house, walked into the kitchen, and noticed a god-awful stink. I mean it smelled nasty in there. I opened the microwave, and the bottom of it was filled with rancid grease. Alex had been using it to cook chicken, and it never occurred to him that the grease had to drain somewhere. It wasn’t that he was too lazy to clean it up-Alex always kept things real neat and orderly-it was just that he hadn’t noticed the grease.' (62-63)"

• Those that personally knew McCandless knew that sometimes he had trouble seeing beyond the initial result of something and into the long term. This quote shows an example of a time when he did this at home. He also did that on his trip to Alaska except this time it had a much more permanent affect.

"Entering the wilderness, purposefully ill-prepared, and surviving a near-death experience does not make you a better human, it makes you lucky (71)"

• Many people thought that for McCandless to have gone on this trip as unprepared as he was he was asking for a death wish. This person thought that it would just have been luck if he had even survived.

" 'There was something fascinating about him,' explains Mrs. Westburg, seated at the polished walnut table where McCandless dined that night. 'Alex struck me as much older than twenty-four. Everything I said, he'd demand to know more about what I meant, about why i thought this way or that. He was hungry to learn about things. Unlike most of us he was the sort of person who insisted n living out his beliefs' (67)"

• Many people who met McCandless were very interested in how anyone could live the way he did. This woman was very impressed with his ability to follow his beliefs and his desire to learn.

"Over the past 15 years, I've run into several of McCandless' types out in the country. Same story: idealistic, energetic young guys who overestimated themselves, underestimated the country and ended up in trouble... His ignorance which could have easily been cured by a USGS quadrant and a Boy Scout manual, is what killed him. And while i feel for his parents, I have no sympathy for him.

• Although many of the people who met McCandless where very impressed, many experienced Alaskans that read his story found him to have been foolish to have gone into the wild with only what knowledge he had.

"McCandless’s personality was puzzling in its complexity. He was intensely private but could be convivial and gregarious in the extreme. And despite his overdeveloped social conscience, he was no tight-lipped, perpetually grim do-gooder who frowned on fun. To the contrary, he enjoyed tipping a glass now and then and was an incorrigible ham. (115)"

• Krakauer saw McCandless as a very interesting and extreme and had a great conscience but even though he was all of those he still enjoyed taking time to have fun and enjoy himself.

"He was ambitious in the extreme, and like Walt McCandless, his aspirations extended to his progeny. (147)"

• Krakauer thinks that McCandless truly thought that he could do this, but because he thought so highly of himself his determination and eagerness to succeed is what ultimately caused his demise.

"McCandless didn’t conform particularly well to the bush-casualty stereotype. Although he was rash, untutored in the ways of the backcountry, and incautious to the point of foolhardiness, he wasn’t incompetent-he wouldn’t have lasted 113 days if he were. And he wasn’t a nutcase, he wasn’t a sociopath, he wasn’t an outcast. McCandless was something else-although precisely what is hard to say. A pilgrim, perhaps. (85)"

• Krakauer saw McCandless as different even from those that strove very hard to be their own person and went on these cray trips. He didn't think he was crazy or prudent because he lasted as long as he did, but maybe he wasn't careful enough to go on this particular trip with only what he knew.

"The prevailing Alaska wisdom held that McCandless was simply one more dreamy half-cocked greenhorn who went into the country expecting to find answers to all his problems and instead found only mosquitos and a lonely death. (72)"

• Krakauer saw McCandless as having done something very honorable going on this trip to find peace within himself and solve all his problems, but by the time he had it figured out he was unable to return and met his death.

McCandless seems to have been driven by a variety of lust that supplemented his sexual desire. His yearning, in a sense, was too powerful to be quenched by human contact. McCandless may have been tempted by the succor offered by women, but it paled beside the prospect of rough congress with nature, with the cosmos itself. And thus he was drawn north, to Alaska. (66)"

• Krakauer saw McCandless as having had his own free will. He was able to ignore what most people were doing to do what would make him happy.

"The next day was Mother’s Day. Chris gave Billie candy, flowers, a sentimental card. She was surprised and extremely touched: It was the first present she had received from her son in more than two years, since he had announced to his parents that, on principle, he would no longer give or accept gifts. Indeed, Chris had only recently upbraided Walt and Billie for expressing their desire to buy him a new car as a graduation present and offering to pay for law school if there wasn’t enough money left in his college fund to cover it. (21)"

• McCandless thought that its very trivial the way society has learned to give gifts. He made an exception to his way of getting away from the trivial things of society by giving his mother a final gift before he took off.

" 'Look, Mr. Franz,' he declared, 'you don't need to worry about me. I have a college education. I'm dot destitute. I'm living like this by choice.' (51)"

• He sees the American society is flawed because people don't do what they want to do if it isn't whats considered normal. He was upset with Mr. Franz for trying to persuade him to go back into society and get a job when he was doing what he enjoyed.

"McCandless' face would darken red with anger, and he'd fulminate about his parents, or politicians, or the endemic idiocy of mainstream American life (52)"

• This quote represents McCandless' attitude toward a flawed society because he would become angry when thinking about the senseless things Americans do from day to day. He protested that the general way of life was needless and unnecessary.

“I’d like to repeat the advice I gave you before, in that I think you really should make a radical change in your lifestyle and begin to boldly do things which you may previously never have thought of doing, or been too hesitant to attempt. So many people live within unhappy circumstances and yet will not take the initiative to change their situation because they are conditioned to a life of security, conformity, and conservatism, all of which may appear to give one peace of mind, but in reality nothing is more damaging to the adventurous spirit within a man than a secure future. (57)"

• McCandless saw society as we know it as being very flawed, this quote represents one reason he thought that. Society has made people feel as if they need to be like everyone else to have security, so they are scared to try something they want to do if it doesn't fit with the rest of society.

"He already had a perfectly good car, he insisted: a beloved 1982 Datsun B210, slightly dented but mechanically sound, with 128,000 miles on the odometer. “I can’t believe they’d try and buy me a car,” he later complained in a letter to Carine, or that they think I’d actually let them pay for my law school if I was going to go… I’ve told them a million times that I have the best car in the world, a car that has spanned the continent from Miami to Alaska, a car that has in all those thousands of miles not given me a single problem, a car that I will never trade in, a car that I am very strongly attached to-yet they ignore what I say and think I’d actually accept a new car from them! I’m going to have to be real careful not to accept any gifts from them in the future because they will think they have bought my respect. (21)"

• He believes that the material things are unnecessary if you have what you need. He also thought that you should work for the things that you want or need not just have them handed to you. This quote shows that because he didn't want the car because it was being given to him and he already had one that worked.