Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

William Least Heat-Moon
Age: 85
Born: 1939
Born: August 27
Historian
Writer
Kansas City
Missouri
Search
Equivalents
Place
Informs
Writing
Explanations
Hunt
Hunts
Quests
Quest
Explanation
Ramble

More quotes by William Least Heat-Moon

Image
To an American, land is solidity, goodness, and hope. American history is about land.
William Least Heat-Moon
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
The biggest hindrance to learning is fear of showing one's self a fool.
William Least Heat-Moon
Image
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
Image
Instead of insight, maybe all a man gets is strength to wander for a while.
William Least Heat-Moon
Image
Be careful going in search of adventure - it's ridiculously easy to find.
William Least Heat-Moon
Image
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
Image
Get out and find ...the country. And ourselves.
William Least Heat-Moon
Image
Beware thoughts that come in the night.
William Least Heat-Moon
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Whoever the last true cowboy in America turns out to be, he's likely to be an Indian.
William Least Heat-Moon
Image
No yesterdays on the road.
William Least Heat-Moon
Image
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
Image
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