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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
Grandfather
Doe
River
Life
Immediately
Rivers
Missouri
Travel
Distinctive
Personality
Presents
Source
Traveler
Spirit
More quotes by 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
Having made the trip from St. Louis to the Pacific Ocean myself going up up up against twenty-five hundred miles of the Missouri River, I can testify that it's one of the most arduous trips that anyone can make on this continent and yet I had a power boat to do it in.
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
...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
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
The biggest hindrance to learning is fear of showing one's self a fool.
William Least Heat-Moon
To an American, land is solidity, goodness, and hope. American history is about land.
William Least Heat-Moon
I did learn what I didn't know I wanted to know.
William Least Heat-Moon
A true journey, no matter how long the travel takes, has no end.
William Least Heat-Moon
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
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
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
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
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
Whoever the last true cowboy in America turns out to be, he's likely to be an Indian.
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
The thing that overwhelms me when I go out now is the sprawlation of America.
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
Memory is each man's own last measure, and for some, the only achievement.
William Least Heat-Moon
Beware thoughts that come in the night.
William Least Heat-Moon