River-Horse Quotes

“I think it an invaluable advantage to be born and brought up in the neighborhood of some grand and noble object in nature: a river, a lake, or a mountain. We make a friendship with it; we in a manner ally ourselves with it for life.”
― William Least Heat-Moon, River-Horse: A Voyage Across America

“and at that moment I understood that I had to make the voyage at whatever cost. If a grail appears, the soul must follow.”
― William Least Heat-Moon, River-Horse: A Voyage Across America

“That's when Pilotis began talking. I couldn't get all of it down, but this is the gist of much of it: 'I didn't know when I left home that I wanted something bigger that people and their little gods and small catechisms, their damned certainties, and covered-over confusions. The Missouri is bigger. It's like a Roman deity--powerful, playful, cantankerous, lusty, profligate, changeable, dangerous, yet still interested in the humanity that approaches it. I'm not deifying it, just comparing it, but anyone who doesn't believe it's a living force--something far more actual than any divinity in any religion--is innocent.”
― William Least Heat-Moon, River-Horse

“Pilotus put the chart down wearily. 'Why is this never easy?' Because this is America, I said. I was thinking that we often fail to understand how wild this land is even today, sometimes mistaking the ruining of wilderness as the subduing of it.”
― William Least Heat-Moon, River-Horse

“In had walked an old fellow, pale as if he'd been partially erased.”
― William Least Heat-Moon, River-Horse