William Least Heat-Moon Quotes & Sayings

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

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

Americans have just got afraid to taste anything. — William Least Heat-Moon

Spirit can go anywhere. In fact, it has to go places so it can change and emerge like in the migrations. That's the whole idea. — William Least Heat-Moon

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

It's a contention of Heat Moon's
believing as he does any traveler who misses the journey misses about all he's going to get
that a man becomes his attentions. His observations and curiosity, they make and remake him. — William Least Heat-Moon

Suddenly, over the slope, as if tethered to a cord of air drawing quickly upward, came a Northern Harrier, motionless but for its rising. So still was the bird - wings, tail, head - it might have been a museum specimen. Then, as if atop the wind, it slid down the ridge, tilted a few times, veered, tacked up the hill, its wings hardly shifting. I though, if I could be that hawk for one hour I'd never again be just a man. — William Least Heat-Moon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Without the errors, wrong turns and blind alleys, without the doubling back and misdirection and fumbling and chance discoveries, there was not one bit of joy in walking the labyrinth. — William Least Heat-Moon

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

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

Could be, but to a historian, it's been going since the beginning. — William Least Heat-Moon

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

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

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

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

Education is thinking, and thinking is looking for yourself and seeing what's there, not what you got told was there. — William Least Heat-Moon

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

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

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

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

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

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

I simply couldn't make it without a copilot. — William Least Heat-Moon

Never did get my curiosity cured,' she said. 'Some people sit around and wait for the world to poke them. Right here in this old curiosity shop of a world, they say, 'Poke me, world,' Well, you have to keep the challenges coming on. Make them up if necessary. — William Least Heat-Moon

Adventure is putting one's ignorance into motion. — William Least Heat-Moon

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

All of those things - rock and men and river - resisted change, resisted the coming as they did the going. Hood warmed and rose slowly, breaking open the plain, and cooled slowly over the plain it buried. The nature of things is resistance to change, while the nature of process is resistance to stasis, yet things and process are one, and the line from inorganic to organic and back is uninterrupted and unbroken. — William Least Heat-Moon

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

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

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

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

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

For me, writing is not a search for explanations but a ramble in quest of what informs a place, a hunt for equivalents. — William Least Heat-Moon

In the sunny flats, kudzu from last year had climbed to wrap trees and telephone poles in dry, brown leaves. Whole buildings looked as if they had been bagged. Introduced from Japan in the thirties to help control erosion that had damaged eighty-five percent of the tillable land, kudzu has consumed entire fields, and no one has found a good way to stop it. Kudzu and water hyacinth, another Japanese import, have run through Dixie showing less restraint than Sherman. — William Least Heat-Moon

American history is parking lots. — William Least Heat-Moon

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

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

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

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

I notice you use 'work' and 'job' interchangeably. oughten to do that. A job's what you force yourself to pay attention to for money. With work, you don't have to force yourself. (Man dining at Claudia Sanders Dinner House) — William Least Heat-Moon