Extreme Experience Quotes

If you're going to try, go all the way. There is no other feeling like that. You will be alone with the gods, and the nights will flame with fire. You will ride life straight to perfect laughter. It's the only good fight there is.

In my books, I never portray violence as a reasonable solution to a problem. If the lead characters in the story are driven to it, it's at the extreme end of their experience.

Duane lived life right on the edge. If you ever read Goethe's Faust, Duane Allman was very much that kind of figure. His deal with Mephistopheles was to experience everything life has to offer, good and bad.

But what if pleasure and pain should be so closely connected that he who wants the greatest possible amount of the one must also have the greatest possible amount of the other, that he who wants to experience the "heavenly high jubilation," must also be ready to be "sorrowful unto death"?

I enjoy being pushed to the limit. Sometimes you feel like you are about to break mentally, but that's what I enjoy.

Although anything can happen when under the influence of ice water.

I have been to Heaven, I've been to Hell, I've been possessed by Lucifer. You can't really get much bigger than that.

What fun it would be to be poor, as long as one was excessively poor! Anything in excess is most exhilarating.

You lovers of knowledge! So what have you done out of your love of knowledge up to now? Have you already stolen and murdered so as to know how a thief and a murderer feels?

And what is shamanism but philosophy with a hands-on attitude. Philosophy not made around the camp fire, but philosophy based on the acquisition of extreme experience. That's how you figure out what the world is, not by bicycling around in the burbs, but by forcing extreme experience.

You feel as if you're not living a full life. Which, of course, is why - it's my theory about why so many people who are heavily into computers are also into extreme sports and S&M. It's because their bodies are crying out for some kind of action.

Sometimes, when you live a life at such a wild edge, an extreme edge of experience, you can come back into the world - if you come back at all - with some essence from that experience that people find useful.

Characters in TV and theatre tend to experience a lot of conflict, so I push myself through sport to physical and emotional levels that hurt so I've some other reference for extreme experience that isn't me shouting at my girlfriend or my mum. It's a way of controlling the uncontrollable.

[John] Belushi was an extreme experience even by my standards.

My life has been extreme. Most people will not have the experience I've had. But the things that changed me, really changed me, they happen to everyone.

The harder stuff has always done it for me. Man, if it rips, I'll give it a thumbs up!

Let me tell you - when I was standing there on top of the world, you become so humble. You don't think about breaking records anymore, you don't think about gaining scientific data - the only thing that you want is to come back alive.

We want to feel hyper-alive, and it's like, the more cartoonish and grotesque the level we can operate at, the better. It's like the world we live in has become quite safe in a lot of ways, and it has become harder to genuinely transgress. But the desire to transgress is a real feeling.

There are periods on the mountain when you exist between living and dying, sometimes for days. I went through that with my brother on Nanga Parbat. It is very difficult, but it is the most intense experience. And always after such experiences, when I was back among people, I felt I had been reborn.

Sensations are the great things, after all. Should you ever be drowned or hung, be sure and make a note of your sensations; they will be worth to you ten guineas a sheet.

I wanna survive an avalanche. I wanna be one of those people a dog finds buried under a ton of snow, almost dying of starvation.

If you ever get the opportunity to work with Quentin Tarantino, you had better believe that it will be an experience of extremes.

The maximum expression of running dogs is the Iditarod. You enter a state of primitive exaltation, and you never return. You're never normal again.

I got so broke that I had to take a job on a show called 'BrainRush.' That was purely for money. I was hosting this game show where it's like 'Cash Cab' on a roller coaster, which is extreme, especially for me, since I hate roller coasters.

I find increasingly that the more extreme are the things going on in your life, the more cultural reference points fail you. More mythical reference points actually help, and you realise that's what myths are for. It's for human beings to process their experience in extremis.