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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
Nothing
Gift
Men
Gets
Strength
Instead
Wonder
Inquire
Maybe
Inheritance
Chance
Wander
Certain
Insight
More quotes by William Least Heat-Moon
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
The biggest hindrance to learning is fear of showing one's self a fool.
William Least Heat-Moon
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.
William Least Heat-Moon
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
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
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'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
No yesterdays on the road.
William Least Heat-Moon
To an American, land is solidity, goodness, and hope. American history is about land.
William Least Heat-Moon
Get out and find ...the country. And ourselves.
William Least Heat-Moon
The open road is a beckoning, a strangeness, a place where a man can lose himself.
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
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
New ways of seeing can disclose new thingsĀ But turn the question around. Do new things make for new ways of seeing?
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
...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?
William Least Heat-Moon
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
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
Life doesn't happen along interstates. It's against the law.
William Least Heat-Moon
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