The way I saw it, my life had been reduced to a handful of seconds, and now I had millions. I realized that everything I was doing had a freshness to it. A magic. The value I'd learned from Jonathan's death, and my own near-death, was that sense of moment. It's an incomparable scale to rate things by, to know what is and what is not a matter of consequence in your life.
-Rick Ridgeway, on an avalanche and Jonathan Wright's death
on Minya Konka.