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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

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William Least Heat-Moon
Age: 85
Born: 1939
Born: August 27
Historian
Writer
Kansas City
Missouri
Real
Quitting
Trying
Dignity
Way
Couldn
Make
Circumstances
Jeopardy
Things
Question
Chuck
Men
Least
Circumstance
Life
Live
Quit
Right
Routine

More quotes by William Least Heat-Moon

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Life doesn't happen along interstates. It's against the law.
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
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I did learn what I didn't know I wanted to know.
William Least Heat-Moon
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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
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Our religion keeps reminding us that we aren't just will and thoughts. We're also sand and wind and thunder. Rain. The seasons. All those things. You learn to respect everything because you are everything. If you respect yourself, you respect all things.
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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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
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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
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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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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
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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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Instead of insight, maybe all a man gets is strength to wander for a while.
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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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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You never feel better than when you start feeling good after you've been feeling bad.
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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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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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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Be careful going in search of adventure - it's ridiculously easy to find.
William Least Heat-Moon