List of William Least Heat-Moon Quotes

I Contend That In The Kind Of Nonfiction I Write, And That Other People Also Pursue, Anything Is Permissible Provided The Reader Knows What You're Taking Liberties With.

To An American, Land Is Solidity, Goodness, And Hope. American History Is About Land.

The Four Horsemen Of The Prairie Are Tornado, Locust, Drought, And Fire, And The Greatest Of These Is Fire, A Rider With Two Faces Because For Everything Taken, It Makes A Return In Equal Measure.

It's Difficult To Write A Book Where A Character Is On Virtually Every Page Of The Book But You Cannot Refer To His Or Her Gender. It Gets Rid Of Every His, Her, She And He.

I Have Not Been On Any River That Has More Of A Distinctive Personality Than Does The Missouri River. It's A River That Immediately Presents To The Traveler, 'i Am A Grandfather Spirit. I Have A Source; I Have A Life.

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.

For Me, Writing Is Not A Search For Explanations But A Ramble In Quest Of What Informs A Place, A Hunt For Equivalents.

Boredom Lies Only With The Traveler's Limited Perception And His Failure To Explore Deeply Enough. After A While, I Found My Perception Limited.

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.

No Yesterdays On The Road.

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.

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?