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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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William Least Heat-Moon
Age: 85
Born: 1939
Born: August 27
Historian
Writer
Kansas City
Missouri
Taken
Drought
Faces
Riders
Makes
Measure
Locust
Two
Equal
Tornado
Everything
Return
Horsemen
Greatest
Tornadoes
Fire
Prairie
Four
Rider

More quotes by William Least Heat-Moon

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To an American, land is solidity, goodness, and hope. American history is about land.
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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.
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I did learn what I didn't know I wanted to know.
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The open road is a beckoning, a strangeness, a place where a man can lose himself.
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Life doesn't happen along interstates. It's against the law.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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?
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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.
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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.
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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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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.
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The biggest hindrance to learning is fear of showing one's self a fool.
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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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Other than to amuse himself, why should a man pretend to know where he's going or understand what he sees?
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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.
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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?
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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