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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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William Least Heat-Moon
Age: 85
Born: 1939
Born: August 27
Historian
Writer
Kansas City
Missouri
Men
Amuse
Pretend
Sees
Understand
Going

More quotes by William Least Heat-Moon

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Get out and find ...the country. And ourselves.
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 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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Instead of insight, maybe all a man gets is strength to wander for a while.
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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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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A true journey, no matter how long the travel takes, has no end.
William Least Heat-Moon
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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
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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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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
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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 open road is a beckoning, a strangeness, a place where a man can lose himself.
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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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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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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Somewhere lives a bad Cajun cook, just as somewhere must live one last ivory-billed woodpecker. For me, I don't expect ever to encounter either one.
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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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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You never feel better than when you start feeling good after you've been feeling bad.
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