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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

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William Least Heat-Moon
Age: 85
Born: 1939
Born: August 27
Historian
Writer
Kansas City
Missouri
Strength
Instead
Wonder
Inquire
Maybe
Inheritance
Chance
Wander
Certain
Insight
Nothing
Gift
Men
Gets

More quotes by William Least Heat-Moon

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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
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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
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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
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Instead of insight, maybe all a man gets is strength to wander for a while.
William Least Heat-Moon
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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
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Be careful going in search of adventure - it's ridiculously easy to find.
William Least Heat-Moon
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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
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At the beginning we learn to travel, then we travel to learn.
William Least Heat-Moon
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On the old highway maps of America, the main routes were red and the back roads blue. Now even the colors are changing.
William Least Heat-Moon
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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
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I like the digressive kind of traveling, where there's not a particular, set, goal.
William Least Heat-Moon
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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
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Historical awareness is a kind of resurrection.
William Least Heat-Moon
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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.
William Least Heat-Moon
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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
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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
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A true journey, no matter how long the travel takes, has no end.
William Least Heat-Moon
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The biggest hindrance to learning is fear of showing one's self a fool.
William Least Heat-Moon
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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
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Memory is each man's own last measure, and for some, the only achievement.
William Least Heat-Moon