Quote

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

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
Wrong
Labyrinth
Chance
Discoveries
Turns
Errors
Back
Discovery
Without
Blind
Misdirection
Walking
Fumbling
Joy
Doubling
Bits
Alleys

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
...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
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
Be careful going in search of adventure - it's ridiculously easy to find.
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
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
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
Image
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
Image
Get out and find ...the country. And ourselves.
William Least Heat-Moon
Image
Life doesn't happen along interstates. It's against the law.
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
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
Image
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
Image
Adventure is putting one's ignorance into motion.
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
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
Image
Whoever the last true cowboy in America turns out to be, he's likely to be an Indian.
William Least Heat-Moon
Image
The thing that overwhelms me when I go out now is the sprawlation of America.
William Least Heat-Moon
Image
Beware thoughts that come in the night.
William Least Heat-Moon
Image
Historical awareness is a kind of resurrection.
William Least Heat-Moon