William Least Heat-Moon Quotes - Page 2

Quotes about:

• 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

  William Least Heat Moon (1991). “Blue Highways: A Journey Into America”, Mariner Books

  9 Copy quote

• 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

  22 Copy quote

• 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

  5 Copy quote

• 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, Negative

  8 Copy quote

• 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

  Sight, Dust, Telescopes

  William Least Heat-Moon (2012). “Blue Highways: A Journey into America”, p.25, Hachette UK

  8 Copy quote

• 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, Light, Space

  Edgar I. Ailor, William Least Heat-Moon (2012). “BLUE HIGHWAYS Revisited”, p.85, University of Missouri Press

  6 Copy quote

• 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

  William Least Heat Moon (1991). “Blue Highways: A Journey Into America”, Mariner Books

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  William Least Heat-Moon (2012). “Blue Highways: A Journey into America”, p.201, Hachette UK

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Ideas, Migration, Facts

  Edgar I. Ailor, William Least Heat-Moon (2012). “BLUE HIGHWAYS Revisited”, p.120, University of Missouri Press

  7 Copy quote

• I like the digressive kind of traveling, where there's not a particular, set, goal.

  William Least Heat-Moon

  Goal, Kind, Setting Goals

  5 Copy quote

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

  William Least Heat-Moon

  Memories, Men, Achievement

  "Blue Highways". Book by William Least Heat-Moon, 1982.

  4 Copy quote

• 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, Knows

  William Least Heat-Moon (2012). “Blue Highways: A Journey into America”, p.204, Hachette UK

  4 Copy quote

• Beware thoughts that come in the night.

  William Least Heat-Moon

  Night, Restriction

  William Least Heat-Moon (2014). “Writing BLUE HIGHWAYS: The Story of How a Book Happened”, p.30, University of Missouri Press

  20 Copy quote

• 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, Spoons, Want

  Interview with John Mcmurtrie, www.sfgate.com. November 16, 2008.

  8 Copy quote

• 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

  Writing, Quests, Explanation

  William Least Heat-Moon (2014). “PrairyErth: A Deep Map”, p.450, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  7 Copy quote

• 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

  16 Copy quote

• 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

  Travel, Rivers, Personality

  4 Copy quote

• The thing that overwhelms me when I go out now is the sprawlation of America.

  William Least Heat-Moon

  America

  Interview with John Mcmurtrie, www.sfgate.com. November 16, 2008.

  4 Copy quote

• 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, Writing, Character

  4 Copy quote

• I did learn what I didn't know I wanted to know.

  William Least Heat-Moon

  Wanted, Knows

  Edgar I. Ailor, William Least Heat-Moon (2012). “BLUE HIGHWAYS Revisited”, p.311, University of Missouri Press

  4 Copy quote

• 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, Encounters

  William Least Heat Moon (1991). “Blue Highways: A Journey Into America”, Mariner Books

  59 Copy quote

• 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

  Blue Highways: A Journey into America ch. 5 (1983)

  4 Copy quote

• No yesterdays on the road.

  William Least Heat-Moon

  Yesterday, Bikers

  "Blue Highways: A Journey into America". Book by William Least Heat-Moon, 1982.

  4 Copy quote

• To an American, land is solidity, goodness, and hope. American history is about land.

  William Least Heat-Moon

  Land, Goodness, American History

  William Least Heat Moon (1991). “Blue Highways: A Journey Into America”, Mariner Books

  5 Copy quote

• 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

  6 Copy quote

Page 2 of 3

First

← Prev

1

2

3

Next →

• facebook
• twitter
• googleplus
• email
• linkedin