"The mountains had been a nural field of activity where, playing onthe frontiers of life and death, we had found the freedom for which we were blindly groping and which was as necessary to us as breath."

This same mountaineer [Maurice Herzog], after nearly losing his life, wrote of "freedom" in a quite different way:

"I saw that it was better to be true than to be strong...I was saved and I had won my freedom. This freedom, which I shall never lose...has given me the rare joy of loving that which I used to despise. A new and splendid life has opened out before me."

-Maurice Herzog, Annapurna (1953)

quoted in Peter Matthiessen, The Snow Leopard (pgs. 117)