William Least Heat-Moon famous quotes

Be careful going in search of adventure - it's ridiculously easy to find.
-- William Least Heat-Moon

#Travel #Adventure #Easy

What is it in man that for a long while lies unknown and unseen only one day to emerge and push him into a new land of the eye, a new region of the mind, a place he has never dreamed of? Maybe it's like the force in spores lying quietly under asphalt until the day they push a soft, bulbous mushroom head right through the pavement. There's nothing you can do to stop it.
-- William Least Heat-Moon

#Lying #Eye #Men

Instead of insight, maybe all a man gets is strength to wander for a while.
-- William Least Heat-Moon

#Men #Wander #Insight

A man who couldn't make things go right could at least go. He could quit trying to get out of the way of life. Chuck routine. Live the real jeopardy of circumstance. It was a question of dignity.
-- William Least Heat-Moon

#Real #Men #Trying

You never feel better than when you start feeling good after you've been feeling bad.
-- William Least Heat-Moon

#Feel Better #Feel Good #Feelings

What you've done becomes the judge of what you're going to do - especially in other people's minds. When you're traveling, you are what you are right there and then. People don't have your past to hold against you. No yesterdays on the road.
-- William Least Heat-Moon

#Travel #Past #Journey

Our religion keeps reminding us that we aren't just will and thoughts. We're also sand and wind and thunder. Rain. The seasons. All those things. You learn to respect everything because you are everything. If you respect yourself, you respect all things.
-- William Least Heat-Moon

#Rain #Wind #Religion

Get out and find ...the country. And ourselves.
-- William Least Heat-Moon

#Country #Exploration

At the beginning we learn to travel, then we travel to learn.
-- William Least Heat-Moon

Life doesn't happen along interstates. It's against the law.
-- William Least Heat-Moon

#Law

Whoever the last true cowboy in America turns out to be, he's likely to be an Indian.
-- William Least Heat-Moon

#Cowboy #America #Lasts

Instead of insight, maybe all a man gets is strength to wander for a while. Maybe the only gift is a chance to inquire, to know nothing for certain. An inheritance of wonder and nothing more.
-- William Least Heat-Moon

#Men #Inheritance #Chance

Other than to amuse himself, why should a man pretend to know where he's going or understand what he sees?
-- William Least Heat-Moon

#Men #Should

Memory is each man's own last measure, and for some, the only achievement.
-- William Least Heat-Moon

#Memories #Men #Achievement

Somewhere lives a bad Cajun cook, just as somewhere must live one last ivory-billed woodpecker. For me, I don't expect ever to encounter either one.
-- William Least Heat-Moon

#Ivory #Cooking #Cajuns

Beware thoughts that come in the night. They aren't turned properly; they come in askew, free of sense and restriction, deriving from the most remote of sources.
-- William Least Heat-Moon

#Night #Source #Restriction

I can't say, over the miles, that I had learned what I had wanted to know because I hadn't known what I wanted to know. But I did learn what I didn't know I wanted to know.
-- William Least Heat-Moon

#Miles #Wanted

The biggest hindrance to learning is fear of showing one's self a fool.
-- William Least Heat-Moon

#Self #Fool #Hindrance

With a nearly desperate sense of isolation and a growing suspicion that I lived in an alien land, I took to the road in search of places where change did not mean ruin and where time and men and deeds connected.
-- William Least Heat-Moon

#Mean #Men #Land

Historical awareness is a kind of resurrection.
-- William Least Heat-Moon

#History #Historical #Kind

The open road is a beckoning, a strangeness, a place where a man can lose himself.
-- William Least Heat-Moon

#Travel #Men #Beckoning

No yesterdays on the road.
-- William Least Heat-Moon

#Yesterday #Bikers

I have not been on any river that has more of a distinctive personality than does the Missouri River. It's a river that immediately presents to the traveler, 'I am a grandfather spirit. I have a source; I have a life.
-- William Least Heat-Moon

#Rivers #Personality #Grandfather

It's difficult to write a book where a character is on virtually every page of the book but you cannot refer to his or her gender. It gets rid of every his, her, she and he.
-- William Least Heat-Moon

#Book #Character #Writing

The negative cost of Lewis and Clark entering the Garden of Eden is that later expeditions regardless of what they were intended to do, later expeditions did not deal with the native peoples with the intelligence with the almost kindly resolve that Lewis and Clark did.
-- William Least Heat-Moon

#Garden #Eden #Cost

There are two kinds of adventurers: those who go truly hoping to find adventure and those who go secretly hoping they won't.
-- William Least Heat-Moon

#Adventure #Two #Kind

The hotel was once where things coalesced, where you could meet both townspeople and travelers. Not so in a motel. No matter how you build it, the motel remains the haunt of the quick and dirty, where the only locals are Chamber of Commerce boys every fourth Thursday. Who ever heard the returning traveler exclaim over one of the great motels of the world he stayed in? Motels can be big, but never grand.
-- William Least Heat-Moon

#Dirty #Boys #World

New ways of seeing can disclose new thingsÂ… But turn the question around. Do new things make for new ways of seeing?
-- William Least Heat-Moon

#Vision #Way #Turns

I contend that in the kind of nonfiction I write, and that other people also pursue, anything is permissible provided the reader knows what you're taking liberties with.
-- William Least Heat-Moon

#Writing #People #Liberty

Boredom lies only with the traveler's limited perception and his failure to explore deeply enough. After a while, I found my perception limited.
-- William Least Heat-Moon

#Lying #Boredom #Perception

At any particular moment in a man's life, he can say that everything he has done and not done, that has been done and not been done to him, has brought him to that moment. If he's being installed as Chieftain or receiving a Nobel Prize, that's a fulfilling notion. But if he's in a sleeping bag at ten thousand feet in a snowstorm, parked in the middle of a highway and waiting to freeze to death, the idea can make him feel calamitously stupid.
-- William Least Heat-Moon

#Stupid #Sleep #Men

Having made the trip from St. Louis to the Pacific Ocean myself going up up up against twenty-five hundred miles of the Missouri River, I can testify that it's one of the most arduous trips that anyone can make on this continent and yet I had a power boat to do it in.
-- William Least Heat-Moon

#Ocean #Rivers #Twenties

Franchises and chains have come to dominate small communities, but those same chains have eliminated a lot of the greasy spoons, places you didn't want to eat in the first place.
-- William Least Heat-Moon

#Community #Want #Firsts

To an American, land is solidity, goodness, and hope. American history is about land.
-- William Least Heat-Moon

#Land #Goodness #American History

On the old highway maps of America, the main routes were red and the back roads blue. Now even the colors are changing.
-- William Least Heat-Moon

#Change #Blue #Color

New ways of seeing can disclose new things: the radio telescope revealed quasars and pulsars, and the scanning electron microscope showed the whiskers of the dust mite. But turn the question around: Do new things make for new ways of seeing?
-- William Least Heat-Moon

#Dust #Sight #Telescopes

I did learn what I didn't know I wanted to know.
-- William Least Heat-Moon

#Wanted

Beware thoughts that come in the night.
-- William Least Heat-Moon

#Night

I like the digressive kind of traveling, where there's not a particular, set, goal.
-- William Least Heat-Moon

#Goal #Kind #Setting Goals

The thing that overwhelms me when I go out now is the sprawlation of America.
-- William Least Heat-Moon

#America

The Lewis and Clark tale has all the all the elements that one would want to put into a movie. It has the, continual threat for life; it's got the thread of Indians; it's got disease. It has daily risk where these men may go under the water. It's got the fight with the elements. It's got the el the role of the unknown continually threatening them.
-- William Least Heat-Moon

#Fighting #Men #Water

I've read that a naked eye can see six thousand stars in the hundred billion galaxies, but I couldn't believe it, what with the sky white with starlight. I saw a million stars with one eye and two million with both.
-- William Least Heat-Moon

#Stars #Believe #Eye

To say nothing is out here is incorrect; to say the desert is stingy with everything except space and light, stone and earth is closer to the truth.
-- William Least Heat-Moon

#Native American #Space #Light