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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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William Least Heat-Moon
Age: 85
Born: 1939
Born: August 27
Historian
Writer
Kansas City
Missouri
Journey
Lose
Loses
Open
Beckoning
Place
Strangeness
Men
Road
Travel
Motivational

More quotes by William Least Heat-Moon

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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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Adventure is putting one's ignorance into motion.
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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Memory is each man's own last measure, and for some, the only achievement.
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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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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Historical awareness is a kind of resurrection.
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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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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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
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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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I did learn what I didn't know I wanted to know.
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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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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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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You never feel better than when you start feeling good after you've been feeling bad.
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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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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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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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