Quotes by William Least Heat-Moon

About William Least Heat-Moon:

William Least Heat-Moon is an American travel writer and historian of English, Irish, and Osage ancestry. He is the author of various bestselling books of topographical U.S. travel writing.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

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

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

William Least Heat-Moon

Suddenly, over the slope, as if tethered to a cord of air drawing quickly upward, came a Northern Harrier, motionless but for its rising. So still was the bird - wings, tail, head - it might have been a museum specimen. Then, as if atop the wind, it ...

William Least Heat-Moon

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 L...

William Least Heat-Moon

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

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...

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

I did learn what I didn't know I wanted to know.

William Least Heat-Moon

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

William Least Heat-Moon

Beware thoughts that come in the night.

William Least Heat-Moon

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.

William Least Heat-Moon

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

William Least Heat-Moon

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

I like the digressive kind of traveling, where there's not a particular, set, goal.

William Least Heat-Moon

I simply couldn't make it without a copilot.

William Least Heat-Moon

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

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

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

All of those things - rock and men and river - resisted change, resisted the coming as they did the going. Hood warmed and rose slowly, breaking open the plain, and cooled slowly over the plain it buried. The nature of things is resistance to change,...

William Least Heat-Moon

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

Author Bio

  • NameWilliam Least Heat-Moon
  • DescriptionAmerican writer
  • BornAugust 27, 1939
  • CountryUnited States Of America
  • ProfessionWriter; Historian
  • WorksBlue Highways