William Least Heat-Moon Quotes - Page 2

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Adventure Journey Travel Writing

Historical awareness is a kind of resurrection.

William Least Heat-Moon

History, Historical, Kind

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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

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Boredom lies only with the traveler's limited perception and his failure to explore deeply enough. After a while, I found my perception limited.

William Least Heat-Moon

Lying, Boredom, Perception

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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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

William Least Heat-Moon

Goal, Kind, Setting Goals

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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.

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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

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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

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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.

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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

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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

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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

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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.

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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

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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

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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)

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No yesterdays on the road.

William Least Heat-Moon

Yesterday, Bikers

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

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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

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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.

William Least Heat-Moon

Taken, Fire, Two

William Least Heat-Moon (2014). “PrairyErth: A Deep Map”, p.87, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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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

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Born: August 27, 1939
Occupation: Writer
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