Three Cups of Tea

- Greg Mortensen & David Oliver Relin

"When it's dark enough, you can see the stars." -Persian proverb

"Drifting in and out of consciousness to a groaning soundtrack of the glacier's mysterious inner machinery, he made his peace with his failure to honor Christa. It was his body that had failed, he decided, not his spirit, and every body had its limits. He, for the first time in his life, had found the absolute limit of his."

"Mortenson saw his first flower in months, one five-petaled pink rosehip, and he knelt to examine it, marking as it did his return from eternal winter. Reeds and sagebrush dotted the riverbanks as they walked down, and life, meager though it was in this rocky river gorge, seemed lush to Mortenson.  The autumn air down at eleven thousand feet had a weight and luxury he'd forgotten."

"..Instead, standing on the other side of the gate, wearing a topi, a lambswool pillbox cap the same distinguished shade of gray as his beard, a wizened old man, with features so strong they might have been carved out of the canyon walls, waited.  His name was Haji Ali and he was the nurmadhar, the chief, of Korphe."

"For years, Mortenson had known, intellectually, that the word 'Muslim' means, literally, 'to submit.' And like many Americans, who worshipped at the temple of rugged individualism, he had found the idea dehumanizing.  But for the first time, kneeling among one hundred strangers, watching them wash away not only impurities, but also, obviously, the aches and cares of their daily lives, he glimpsed the pleasure to be found in submission to a ritualized fellowship of prayer."

"With Manzor he knelt and crossed his arms to address Allah respectfully.  The men around him weren't looking at the advertisement on the wall, he knew, they were looking inward.  Nor were they regarding him.  As he pressed his forehead against the still-warm ground, Greg Mortenson realized that, for the first moment during all his days in Pakistan, no one was looking at him as an outsider No one was looking at him at all.  Allah Akobhar, he chanted quietly, God is great, adding his voice to the chorus in the darkened lot.  The belief rippling around him was strong.  It was powerful enough to convert a gas station into a holy place. Who knew what other wonders of transformation lay ahead?"

"Norberg-Hodge admiringly quotes the king of another Himalayan country, Bhutan, who says the true measure of a nation's success is not gross national product, but 'gross national happiness.'  On their warm, dry roofs, among the fruits of their successful harvest, eating, smoking, and gossiping with the same sense of leisure as Parisians on the terrace of a sidwalk cafe, Mortenson felt sure that, despite all that they lacked, the Balti still held the key to a kind of uncomplicated happiness that was disapparing in the developing world as fast as old-growth forests."

"There is a candle in your heart, ready to be kindled.  There is a void in your soul, ready to be filled.  You feel it, don't you?" -Rumi

"What have you done for the last fifty years?" -Jean Hoerni

"Listen to the wind."

"K2 flashed onto the screen behind him, its otherworldly pyramid painfully white against the blue bowl of the atmosphere.  Here, in front of scores of the world's leading alpinists, was his failure, projected high as a three-story house for thousands of people to see.  So why did he feel like his life had reached a new summit?"

- 從身體上來說，人永遠無法衝破自然的極限， 在到達顛峰後，永遠會走下坡路，永遠是敗者。Greg Mortensen以自己人生的堅實足跡重新定義了成功和失敗。當站在他曾登頂失敗的K２麵前，在精神上Mortensen卻超越極限，達到了常人從未攀登過的顛峰, 這是更高境界上的成功。

"I want to be thoroughly used up when I die" (on the porcelain pendant around Julia Bergman's neck)