Blue Highways: A Journey into America

by William Least Heat-Moon

the Shakers—like the red man—could love craft and yet never become materialists.

A man ought to honor other people, but he’s got to honor what he believes in too.”

Here Virginia Dare was born only to vanish from history without a trace nine days later.

Sooner or later, a man carries the seeds of his destruction with him, but I’d never seen a seed like that one.

not so much on constraint but on aspiration toward a deeper

“Memory is a kind of accomplishment.” Maybe. And maybe too, in the end, it’s the only thing one can call truly his own. Memory is each man’s own last measure, and for some, the only achievement.

“I guess, but my point was that 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.” I was doing it again.

An empty man full of himself?

A human being’s grandest task is to keep from breaking with things outside himself.

“Nothing ever bridged the gulf between the man who went and the man who stayed behind.”

looked more

“Everything the Power of the World does is done in a circle.” A

that inclination to get away from it all while hauling it all along—but

basin and

THE wind came in over the Coastal Range in the night and blew the sky so clean it looked distilled.

On that May morning the wind came strong at my back, and the square stern of Ghost Dancing served as sail; even resting easy on the accelerator, I blew past clusters of buildings that had got in the way of 2 so they could call themselves towns:

I joined the other diners, some of whose gizzards had already begun wrestling hamburgers named for their weight.

On the road, where change is continuous and visible, time is not; rather it is something the rider only infers. Time is not the traveler’s fourth dimension—change is.