William Least Heat-Moon Quotes

Life doesn't happen along interstates. It's against the law.

You never feel better than when you start feeling good after you've been feeling bad.

The four horsemen of the prairie are tornado, locust, drought, and fire, and the greatest of these is fire, a rider with two faces because for everything taken, it makes a return in equal measure.

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.

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.

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.

No yesterdays on the road.

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.

Instead of insight, maybe all a man gets is strength to wander for a while.

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.

Memory is each man's own last measure, and for some, the only achievement.

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.

Whoever the last true cowboy in America turns out to be, he's likely to be an Indian.

The biggest hindrance to learning is fear of showing one's self a fool.

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.

Adventure is putting one's ignorance into motion.

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.

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

For me, writing is not a search for explanations but a ramble in quest of what informs a place, a hunt for equivalents.

The open road is a beckoning, a strangeness, a place where a man can lose himself.

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

A true journey, no matter how long the travel takes, has no end.

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.

At the beginning we learn to travel, then we travel to learn.

Get out and find ...the country. And ourselves.

One of the sweet and expectable aspects of life afloat is the perpetual present moment one lives in and a perception that time is nothing more than the current, an eternal flowing back to the sea.

...who can say where a voyage starts - not the the actual passage but the dream of a journey and its urge to find a way?

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.

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.

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.

Historical awareness is a kind of resurrection.

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