William Least Heat-Moon Quotes
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.
...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?
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.
On the old highway maps of America, the main routes were red and the back roads blue. Now even the colors are changing.
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.
There are two kinds of adventurers: those who go truly hoping to find adventure and those who go secretly hoping they won't.
New ways of seeing can disclose new things But turn the question around. Do new things make for new ways of seeing?
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.
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.
The open road is a beckoning, a strangeness, a place where a man can lose himself.
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.
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.
For me, writing is not a search for explanations but a ramble in quest of what informs a place, a hunt for equivalents.
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.
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.
Boredom lies only with the traveler's limited perception and his failure to explore deeply enough. After a while, I found my perception limited.
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.
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.
I like the digressive kind of traveling, where there's not a particular, set, goal.
You never feel better than when you start feeling good after you've been feeling bad.
To an American, land is solidity, goodness, and hope. American history is about land.
Memory is each man's own last measure, and for some, the only achievement.
Other than to amuse himself, why should a man pretend to know where he's going or understand what he sees?
The thing that overwhelms me when I go out now is the sprawlation of America.
Whoever the last true cowboy in America turns out to be, he's likely to be an Indian.
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.
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.
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.