Whipplesnaith > Quotes

“It is the conquest of this fear that adds half the charm to climbing.”
― Whipplesnaith

“We think of those nights spent with one or more friends, nights when we merged with the shadows and could see the world with eyes that were not our own.”
― Whipplesnaith

“But the chapel, that will never be prosaic. Those who have seen it outlined against the sunset or the full moon, those who have seen its sloping leaded roof-top glisten after a shower of rain, those who have looked down upon the world from its summit, all those who have seen these things will remember the poetry that it has taught them. And while each man changes from year to year, going through the continual changes that make a lifetime, the chapel remains always the same. When the rest of Cambridge is crumbling and in ruins, the chapel will still be standing, the last to fall to time as it is the last to fall to climbers.”
― Whipplesnaith

“Sometimes those experiences crowd back upon the memory, and the past flashes back like a distant peak momentarily lighted up by sunbeam piercing through the clouds. Then oblivion again. Strange it is how the prosaic present may hide the exciting past.”
― Whipplesnaith

“That time when past begins to look longer than the future”
― Whipplesnaith, The Night Climbers of Cambridge

“There is no night porter wandering about in King's. The authorities pay you the compliment, ugly gate-crasher, of treating you as a grown-up. And since we are not grown-up you and I, we will perform our midnight frolics as the inmates burn the midnight oil.”
― Whipplesnaith

“Lest others should attempt the ascent of this terrible climb and perish, they swore themselves to secrecy (telling only enough people to ensure the perpetuation of their epic) and went off to try Everest instead.”
― Whipplesnaith

“Alas! Charles made the promise glibly, and forgot all about it.”
― Whipplesnaith

“By a curious perversity, the human mind refuses to behave itself on the occasions when it should be intensely dramatic. It was so now; the climber suddenly forgot his fears in a smile. The choir had chosen this precise moment to start the Nunc Dimittis.”
― Whipplesnaith

“The root of the trouble lies usually in the mistaken attitude of the beginner. Instead of looking at an easy scramble close to the ground and thinking "I could do that", he looks at some forbidding vertical wall which he knows has been climed, and feels "I could never do that". When told that an impossible-looking building is a field for climbers, he is apt to feel, like a child watching a conjurer, that there is magic in it and it is not for him. So he shies, and perhaps never makes a start.”
― Whipplesnaith, The Night Climbers of Cambridge

“The climber, like a fox which is hard-pressed, should always have one more trick in his bag.”
― Whipplesnaith, The Night Climbers of Cambridge