Sara’s Reviews > Blue Highways > Status Update

"As a nation, we are the children of those who tried to solve old problems with a new place"

"Perhaps it's in our blood, maybe it's just in our history, but surely it's in the American vein to head out for some other place when home becomes intolerable"

"Having the gumption to live different and the sense to let everybody else live different. That's the hardest thing, hands down."

"'I never worried about making a living,' he said, 'but I've done thinking about make a life. It's hard to know the difference sometimes, and it must be getting harder, judging by all them that don't know the difference now.'
'What is the difference?'
'Best way to tell it is that if you're trying to make a killing, what's going to get killed is your life.'"

"The isolating immensity reveals what lies covered in places noisier, busier, more filled up. For me, what I saw revealed was this (only this): a man nearly desperate because his significance had come to lie within his own narrow ambit."

"Instead of insight, maybe all a man gets is strength to wander for awhile. Maybe the only gift is a change to inquire, to know nothing for certain. An inheritance of wonder and nothing more."

"Always to demand established routes, habitual ways, then, is to go against the grain of life."

"If a man can keep alert and imaginative, an error is a possibility, a change at something new; to him, wandering and wondering are part of the same process, and he is most mistaken, most in error, whenever he quits exploring."

"Other than to amuse himself, why should a man pretend to know where he's going or to understand what he sees?"