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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
Chance
Wander
Certain
Insight
Nothing
Gift
Men
Gets
Strength
Instead
Wonder
Inquire
Maybe
Inheritance

More quotes by 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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Get out and find ...the country. And ourselves.
William Least Heat-Moon
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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
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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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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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At the beginning we learn to travel, then we travel to learn.
William Least Heat-Moon
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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
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Memory is each man's own last measure, and for some, the only achievement.
William Least Heat-Moon
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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
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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
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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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Beware thoughts that come in the night.
William Least Heat-Moon
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To an American, land is solidity, goodness, and hope. American history is about land.
William Least Heat-Moon
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The open road is a beckoning, a strangeness, a place where a man can lose himself.
William Least Heat-Moon
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Historical awareness is a kind of resurrection.
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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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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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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You never feel better than when you start feeling good after you've been feeling bad.
William Least Heat-Moon
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Without the errors, wrong turns and blind alleys, without the doubling back and misdirection and fumbling and chance discoveries, there was not one bit of joy in walking the labyrinth.
William Least Heat-Moon