William Least Heat-Moon Quotes

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

Historical awareness is a kind of resurrection.

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.

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

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.

New ways of seeing can disclose new things… But turn the question around. Do new things make for new ways of seeing?

Adventure is putting one's ignorance into motion.

...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?

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.

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.