Quotes from 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.

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.

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.

You never feel better than when you start feeling good after you've been feeling bad.

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

Historical awareness is a kind of resurrection.

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

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.

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.

Life doesn't happen along interstates. It's against the law.

Beware thoughts that come in the night.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

There are two kinds of adventurers: those who go truly hoping to find adventure and those who go secretly hoping they won't.

At the beginning we learn to travel, then we travel to learn.

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.

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.

When you're travelling, you are what you are right there and then. People don't have your past to hold against you. No yesterdays on the road.

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.'

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.

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.