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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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William Least Heat-Moon
Age: 85
Born: 1939
Born: August 27
Historian
Writer
Kansas City
Missouri
Source
Presents
Spirit
Traveler
Doe
Grandfather
Life
River
Immediately
Rivers
Travel
Missouri
Personality
Distinctive
More quotes by William Least Heat-Moon
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
Instead of insight, maybe all a man gets is strength to wander for a while.
William Least Heat-Moon
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
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
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
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
...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
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
Historical awareness is a kind of resurrection.
William Least Heat-Moon
No yesterdays on the road.
William Least Heat-Moon
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
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
To an American, land is solidity, goodness, and hope. American history is about land.
William Least Heat-Moon
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
