Into the Wild quotes: 25 lines, sorted by who actually wrote them

The line the search is named after, and the last message he sent to anyone. It closes a short postcard from Fairbanks, written two days after he arrived and roughly two weeks before he walked up the Stampede Trail. Read whole, the postcard is chattier and more ordinary than the sentence suggests, which is rather the point.

Two sentences above the famous one, and almost nobody quotes it. Note your for you’re. The sourced record marks it as written, and most quote pages silently fix it. We leave it, because a man writing in a hurry on a postcard is the actual historical object here.

The opening of a much longer declaration he cut into the bus on his second day there, signed Alexander Supertramp, May 1992. The capitalisation is his. It reads like a trailer for a life, written by the person about to live it, and it is the most cinematic thing in the whole documentary record, which is probably why the 2007 film uses it almost unaltered.

Written to an eighty-year-old man he had met in California, urging him to sell up and get on the road. It is the longest sustained piece of argument he left behind, and it is usually quoted in three-word fragments that turn it into a poster. Whole, it is a young man telling a much older one how to live, which is either bracing or unbearable depending on the day you read it.

From the same letter, and the most reproduced sentence in it. Their for there, again left as written. This is the line that gets printed over a photograph of a road, which is a fair enough use of it, though the sentence immediately before it is doing the harder work.

Worth reading against the margin note three cards below. In April he tells Franz that joy does not come chiefly from other people. In late July, in the bus, he writes four words that say close to the opposite. Both are his. Any page that gives you only one of them is giving you half a person.

The four most searched words on this subject, and three things about them are routinely got wrong. It is not Krakauer’s prose, it is a note in a paperback margin. It is not a sentence, there is no verb and no full stop. And the sourced record files it as disputed rather than settled, because it is a handwritten marginal note being read by other people. The wording trace, including what happens when the tidy version inserts an is, is argued on our Krakauer profile, linked on the attribution above. What belongs here is the other half: the Pasternak passage he was annotating runs the other way round, that an unshared happiness is not happiness. He was agreeing with a novel, in its margin, in the last weeks of his life.

He signs his own name, not Alexander Supertramp. That detail does more work than any of the famous lines. The question mark after August is his: by then he had lost track of the date.

The last thing he wrote. The journal had stopped five days earlier on two words about blueberries. Note that the search term “last line of Into the Wild” has three plausible answers: this note, the end of Krakauer’s book, and the film’s closing voice-over. Three different texts by three different authors.

The sentence at the centre of this whole story, and the one most often printed wrong. What circulates, and what the 2007 film says, is a longer version with faith and fairness added. The film is honest about it: the script has the character announce that he is paraphrasing. The internet dropped that part. Thoreau’s nine words are above, matched in the Conclusion of Walden.

Carried here for one reason: McCandless was attempting in a literal sense a thing Thoreau never was. Thoreau’s cabin was a twenty-minute walk from his mother’s house and he went back for meals. The Stampede Trail bus was about twenty miles from the nearest road, with a river in between. Same sentence, two completely different bets.

Almost always quoted as the first sentence alone. The second sentence is the one that bites, and it is right there in the same paragraph of Economy. Half a quotation is how a diagnosis becomes a mood.

The passage that sits a few lines away from “give me truth” and almost never travels with it. Read together they are an argument about staying rather than leaving, which is an awkward fit for the way this story usually gets told.

Read aloud in the 2007 film, and worth having in Thoreau’s wording because the film changes two words. The film says a place of heathenism and the wild animals. Thoreau wrote a place for heathenism and wild animals, matched in Ktaadn. It is also the passage that most complicates the romance: Thoreau on a real mountain is unnerved, not uplifted.

Regularly quoted as though Krakauer wrote it. He did not. It is London, and McCandless had carved Jack London is king into the bus before he ever got near the bottom of it. Chapter III of The Call of the Wild, matched word for word against the full text.

The sentence the short famous one comes out of, and one of the very few places where the Alaska of McCandless’s reading and the Alaska he actually walked into can be held side by side without flinching. London is describing a dog hunting. The romance and the indifference are in the same paragraph.

Quoted in the 2007 film and credited there to Tolstoy, correctly. What the film does not say is where: it is the closing sentence of the first chapter of the First Epilogue, matched against the complete text. Tolstoy is arguing about historians and great men. In the film it becomes a young man’s licence, which is a long way from what the paragraph is doing.

Krakauer describing McCandless setting out, and constantly reposted as though McCandless said it about himself. He did not. This is a reporter writing four years after the fact, and the sentence is carrying the irony the reader already knows about.

From the two chapters where Krakauer turns the book on himself and his own solo climb on the Devils Thumb in 1977. It first appeared six years earlier in Eiger Dreams (1990) with slightly different punctuation, which is the correct first credit if you quote it alone. The full trace is on the Krakauer profile linked above.

From the scene with the apple, which is entirely the film’s invention. It is charming, it is quoted everywhere as though it came off the bus wall, and it is Penn.

Probably the single most reposted “Into the Wild quote” that is not in the book in any form. It is dialogue, written for the beach scene with Rainey. Quote it happily, credit the screenplay.

From the long exchange with Wayne Westerberg about what being out there would actually be like. The scene draws on things Westerberg said afterwards; the sentence itself is the film’s.

Seven words that carry the whole thesis, which is what a screenplay is for. The documentary version is duller and longer: he gave away what was left of his savings and burned the cash in his wallet.

The film flags this one as a quotation and the internet has been reattributing it to McCandless ever since. It is Levi. If you are going to post it, post it as Levi, with the film as the place you met it.

The film’s last line, and the most common wrong answer to “what is the last line of Into the Wild”. It closes the film. It does not close the book, and it is not among the notes he left.