William Least Heat-Moon - Blue Highways (1982)

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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.

William Least Heat-Moon
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
You never feel better than when you start feeling good after you've been feeling bad.

William Least Heat-Moon
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
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
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
The hotel was once where things coalesced, where you could meet both townspeople and travelers. Not so in a motel. No matter how you build it, the motel remains the haunt of the quick and dirty, where the only locals are Chamber of Commerce boys every fourth Thursday. Who ever heard the returning traveler exclaim over one of the great motels of the world he stayed in? Motels can be big, but never grand.

William Least Heat-Moon
To an American, land is solidity, goodness, and hope. American history is about land.

William Least Heat-Moon
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
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
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
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
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
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
The biggest hindrance to learning is fear of showing one's self a fool.

William Least Heat-Moon
The open road is a beckoning, a strangeness, a place where a man can lose himself.

William Least Heat-Moon
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
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
What is it in man that for a long while lies unknown and unseen only one day to emerge and push him into a new land of the eye, a new region of the mind, a place he has never dreamed of? Maybe it's like the force in spores lying quietly under asphalt until the day they push a soft, bulbous mushroom head right through the pavement. There's nothing you can do to stop it.

William Least Heat-Moon
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
The true West differs from the East in one great, pervasive, awesome way: space.

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
Memory is each man's own last measure, and for some, the only achievement.

William Least Heat-Moon
In a land of quince jelly, apple butter, apricot jam, blueberry preserves, pear conserves, and lemon marmalade, you always get grape jelly.

William Least Heat-Moon
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
Whoever the last true cowboy in America turns out to be, he's likely to be an Indian.

William Least Heat-Moon
Be careful going in search of adventure - it's ridiculously easy to find.

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
At any particular moment in a man's life, he can say that everything he has done and not done, that has been done and not been done to him, has brought him to that moment. If he's being installed as Chieftain or receiving a Nobel Prize, that's a fulfilling notion. But if he's in a sleeping bag at ten thousand feet in a snowstorm, parked in the middle of a highway and waiting to freeze to death, the idea can make him feel calamitously stupid.

William Least Heat-Moon