Blue Highways Quotes

“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, Blue Highways

“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.”
― William Least Heat Moon, Blue Highways. Eine Reise in Amerika.

“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.”
― William Least Heat-Moon, Blue Highways

“The biggest hindrance to learning is fear of showing one's self a fool.”
― William Least Heat-Moon, Blue Highways

“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, Blue Highways

“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.”
― William Least Heat Moon, Blue Highways. Eine Reise in Amerika.

“Memory is each man's own last measure, and for some, the only achievement.”
― William Least Heat-Moon, Blue Highways

“Never did get my curiosity cured,' she said. 'Some people sit around and wait for the world to poke them. Right here in this old curiosity shop of a world, they say, 'Poke me, world,' Well, you have to keep the challenges coming on. Make them up if necessary.”
― William Least Heat-Moon, Blue Highways

“It's a contention of Heat Moon's -- believing as he does any traveler who misses the journey misses about all he's going to get-- that a man becomes his attentions. His observations and curiosity, they make and remake him.”
― William Least Heat Moon, Blue Highways. Eine Reise in Amerika.

“Here the earth, as if to prove its immensity, empties itself. Gertrude Stein said: 'In the United States there is more space where nobody is than where anybody is. That is what makes America what it is.' The uncluttered stretches of the American West and the deserted miles of roads force a lone traveler to pay attention to them by leaving him isolated in them. This squander of land substitutes a sense of self with a sense of place by giving him days of himself until, tiring of his own small compass, he looks for relief to the bigness outside -- a grandness that demands attention not just for its scope, but for its age, its diversity, its continual change. 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.”
― William Least Heat-Moon, Blue Highways

“Education is thinking, and thinking is looking for yourself and seeing what’s there, not what you got told was there.”
― William Least Heat-Moon, Blue Highways: A Journey into America

“A car whipped past, the driver eating and a passenger clicking a camera. Moving without going anywhere, taking a trip instead of making one. I laughed at the absurdity of the photographs and then realized I, too, was rolling effortlessly along, turning the windshield into a movie screen in which I, the viewer, did the moving while the subject held still. That was the temptation of the American highway, of the American vacation (from the Latin vacare, "to be empty").”
― William Least Heat-Moon, Blue Highways

“These are the days that must happen to you,”
― William Least Heat-Moon, Blue Highways: A Journey into America

“The nature of things is resistance to change, while the nature of process is resistance to stasis,”
― William Least Heat-Moon, Blue Highways: A Journey into America

“If a man can keep alert and imaginative, an error is a possibility, a chance 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.”
― William Least Heat-Moon, Blue Highways: A Journey into America

“Don’t go around hurting each other,’ and she said, ‘Try to understand things.”
― William Least Heat-Moon, Blue Highways: A Journey into America

“Ego, craving distinction, belongs to the narrowness of now; but self, looking for union, belongs to the past and future, to the continuum, to the outside. Of all the visions of the Grandfathers, the greatest is this: To seek the high concord, a man looks not deeper within - he reaches farther out.”
― William Least Heat-Moon, Blue Highways

“A rule of the blue road: Be careful going in search of adventure—it’s ridiculously easy to find.”
― William Least Heat-Moon, Blue Highways: A Journey into America

“American history is parking lots.”
― William Least Heat-Moon, Blue Highways: A Journey into America

“road so crooked it could run for the legislature,”
― William Least Heat-Moon, Blue Highways: A Journey into America

“Tell me what's the hardest thing about living on a small, marshy island in Chesapeake Bay.

I know that and it didn't take sixty three years to figure it out... Having the gumption to live different and the sense to let everybody else live different. That's the hardest thing, hands down.”
― William Least Heat-Moon, Blue Highways

“Versi di un canto Navajo

Poi gli dissero:
Tutto quello che hai visto, ricordalo,
Perché tutto quel che dimentichi
Ritorna a volare nel vento.”
― William Least Heat-Moon, Blue Highways

“Our beginnings do not foreshadow our ends if one judges by the Hudson River.”
― William Least Heat-Moon, Blue Highways

“A traveling salesman once told me that if you tense butt muscles tight enough, you can run on an empty tank for miles.”
― William Least Heat-Moon, Blue Highways

“There are two kinds of adventurers: those who go truly hoping to find adventure and those who go secretly hoping they won’t.”
― William Least Heat-Moon, Blue Highways

“Learning rules is useful but it isn’t education. Education is thinking, and thinking is looking for yourself and seeing what’s there, not what you got told was there. Then you put what you see together. It’s”
― William Least Heat-Moon, Blue Highways: A Journey into America

“Sometimes a man's experience is like the sweep second hand on a clock, touching each point in its circuit but always the arcs of movement repeating.”
― William Least Heat-Moon, Blue Highways

“Maybe experience is like a globe -- you can't go the wrong way if you travel far enough.”
― William Least Heat-Moon, Blue Highways

“...early on I learned to travel, later I travelled to learn."
--from an interview in /Blue Highways/,”
― William Least Heat-Moon, Blue Highways

“The future should grow from the past, not obliterate it.”
― William Least Heat-Moon, Blue Highways