In our youth we had not been mislead by fantasies, nor by the bloody battles of modern warfare which feed the imagination of the young. For us the mountains had been a natural field of activity where, playing on the forntiers of life and death, we found the freedom for which we were blindly groping and which was as necessary to us as bread. The mountains had bestowed on us their beauties, and we adorned them with a child's simplicity and revered them with a monk's veneration of the divine.
-Herzog, "Annapurna"