William Least Heat-Moon quotes

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)

Beware thoughts that come in the night.

William Least Heat-Moon

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

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

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.

William Least Heat-Moon

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

William Least Heat-Moon

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.

William Least Heat-Moon

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

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.

William Least Heat-Moon

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

William Least Heat-Moon

When you're travelling, you are what you are right there and then. People don't have your past to hold against you. No yesterdays on the road. (William Least Heat-Moon)

In a land of quince jelly, apple butter, apricot jam, blueberry preserves, pear conserves, and lemon marmalade, you always get grape jelly.

William Least Heat-Moon

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.

William Least Heat-Moon

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

William Least Heat-Moon

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

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.

William Least Heat-Moon

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

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

William Least Heat-Moon

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

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

William Least Heat-Moon

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)

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

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