"Somewhere lives a bad Cajun cook, just as somewhere must live one last ivory-billed woodpecker. For me, I don't expect ever to encounter either one."
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Quote collection
William Least Heat-Moon quotes (page 1 of 3)
51 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Be careful going in search of adventure - it's ridiculously easy to find."
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"The hotel was once where things coalesced, where you could meet both townspeople and travelers. Not so in a motel. No matter how you build it, the motel remains the haunt of the quick and dirty, where the only locals are Chamber of Commerce boys every fourth Thursday. Who ever heard the returning traveler exclaim over one of the great motels of the world he stayed in? Motels can be big, but never grand."
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"What is it in man that for a long while lies unknown and unseen only one day to emerge and push him into a new land of the eye, a new region of the mind, a place he has never dreamed of? Maybe it's like the force in spores lying quietly under asphalt until the day they push a soft, bulbous mushroom head right through the pavement. There's nothing you can do to stop it."
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"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."
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"Beware thoughts that come in the night."
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"Instead of insight, maybe all a man gets is strength to wander for a while."
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"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 boat to do it in."
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"...who can say where a voyage starts - not the the actual passage but the dream of a journey and its urge to find a way?"
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"Without the errors, wrong turns and blind alleys, without the doubling back and misdirection and fumbling and chance discoveries, there was not one bit of joy in walking the labyrinth."
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"A true journey, no matter how long the travel takes, has no end."
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"The biggest hindrance to learning is fear of showing one's self a fool."
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"On the old highway maps of America, the main routes were red and the back roads blue. Now even the colors are changing."
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"Get out and find ...the country. And ourselves."
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"I can't say, over the miles, that I had learned what I had wanted to know because I hadn't known what I wanted to know. But I did learn what I didn't know I wanted to know."
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"At any particular moment in a man's life, he can say that everything he has done and not done, that has been done and not been done to him, has brought him to that moment. If he's being installed as Chieftain or receiving a Nobel Prize, that's a fulfilling notion. But if he's in a sleeping bag at ten thousand feet in a snowstorm, parked in the middle of a highway and waiting to freeze to death, the idea can make him feel calamitously stupid."
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"New ways of seeing can disclose new things But turn the question around. Do new things make for new ways of seeing?"
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"There are two kinds of adventurers: those who go truly hoping to find adventure and those who go secretly hoping they won't."
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"New ways of seeing can disclose new things: the radio telescope revealed quasars and pulsars, and the scanning electron microscope showed the whiskers of the dust mite. But turn the question around: Do new things make for new ways of seeing?"
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"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."
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