Top 60 William Least Heat-Moon Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “The open road is a beckoning, a strangeness, a place where a man can lose himself.”

— William Least Heat-Moon

2. “A true journey, no matter how long the travel takes, has no end.”

— William Least Heat-Moon

3. “At the beginning we learn to travel, then we travel to learn.”

— William Least Heat-Moon

4. “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

Featured in: Carpe Diem Quotes

5. “Historical awareness is a kind of resurrection.”

— William Least Heat-Moon

6. “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

7. “You never feel better than when you start feeling good after you’ve been feeling bad.”

— William Least Heat-Moon

8. “No yesterdays on the road.”

— William Least Heat-Moon

9. “The biggest hindrance to learning is fear of showing one’s self a fool.”

— William Least Heat-Moon

10. “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

11. “Be careful going in search of adventure – it’s ridiculously easy to find.”

— William Least Heat-Moon

12. “Beware thoughts that come in the night.”

— William Least Heat-Moon

13. “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

14. “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

15. “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

16. “If you’re gonna run away from home, take a dog along.”

— William Least Heat-Moon

17. “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

18. “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

19. “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

20. “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

21. “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

22. “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

23. “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

24. “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

25. “Boredom lies only with the traveler’s limited perception and his failure to explore deeply enough. After a while, I found my perception limited.”

— William Least Heat-Moon

26. “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

27. “Whoever the last true cowboy in America turns out to be, he’s likely to be an Indian.”

— William Least Heat-Moon

28. “Memory is each man’s own last measure, and for some, the only achievement.”

— William Least Heat-Moon

29. “Ego, craving distinction, belongs to the narrowness of now; but self, looking for union, belongs to the past and future, to the continuum, to the outside. Of all the visions of the Grandfathers, the greatest is this: To seek the high concord, a man looks not deeper within – he reaches farther out.”

— William Least Heat-Moon

30. “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

31. “It’s difficult to write a book where a character is on virtually every page of the book but you cannot refer to his or her gender. It gets rid of every his, her, she and he.”

— William Least Heat-Moon

32. “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

33. “I did learn what I didn’t know I wanted to know.”

— William Least Heat-Moon

34. “Life doesn’t happen along interstates. It’s against the law.”

— William Least Heat-Moon

35. “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

36. “One of the sweet and expectable aspects of life afloat is the perpetual present moment one lives in and a perception that time is nothing more than the current, an eternal flowing back to the sea.”

— William Least Heat-Moon

37. “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

38. “Adventure is putting one’s ignorance into motion.”

— William Least Heat-Moon

39. “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

40. “To an American, land is solidity, goodness, and hope. American history is about land.”

— William Least Heat-Moon

41. “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

42. “Don’t go around hurting each other,’ and she said, ‘Try to understand things.”

— William Least Heat-Moon

43. “Instead of insight, maybe all a man gets is strength to wander for a while.”

— William Least Heat-Moon

44. “The thing that overwhelms me when I go out now is the sprawlation of America.”

— William Least Heat-Moon

45. “I like the digressive kind of traveling, where there’s not a particular, set, goal.”

— William Least Heat-Moon

46. “I’ve become the woman after the French tickler.”

— William Least Heat-Moon

47. “It’s a contention of Heat Moon’s – believing as he does any traveler who misses the journey misses about all he’s going to get – that a man becomes his attentions. His observations and curiosity, they make and remake him.”

— William Least Heat-Moon

48. “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.”

— William Least Heat-Moon

49. “In the sunny flats, kudzu from last year had climbed to wrap trees and telephone poles in dry, brown leaves. Whole buildings looked as if they had been bagged. Introduced from Japan in the thirties to help control erosion that had damaged eighty-five percent of the tillable land, kudzu has consumed entire fields, and no one has found a good way to stop it. Kudzu and water hyacinth, another Japanese import, have run through Dixie showing less restraint than Sherman.”

— William Least Heat-Moon

50. “The future should grow from the past, not obliterate it.”

— William Least Heat-Moon