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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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William Least Heat-Moon
Age: 85
Born: 1939
Born: August 27
Historian
Writer
Kansas City
Missouri
Known
Learn
Didn
Wanted
Hadn
Miles
Learned

More quotes by William Least Heat-Moon

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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
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Beware thoughts that come in the night.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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A true journey, no matter how long the travel takes, has no end.
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
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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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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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To an American, land is solidity, goodness, and hope. American history is about land.
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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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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...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