William Least Heat-Moon

“What burned in these men that didn't burn in me? A difference of focus or something outside of me? A lack or too much of something? ... I'm not an authority, God knows, but if there is a way...”

“On the road, where change is continuous and visible, time is not; rather it is something the rider only infers. Time is not the traveler's fourth dimension - change is.”

“There are two kinds of adventurers: those who go truly hoping to find adventure and those who go secretly hoping they won t.”

“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...”

“I've read that a naked eye can see six thousand stars in the hundred billion galaxies, but I couldn't believe it, what with the sky white with starlight. I saw a million stars with one eye a...”

“The negative cost of Lewis and Clark entering the Garden of Eden is that later expeditions regardless of what they were intended to do, later expeditions did not deal with the native peoples...”

“I like the digressive kind of traveling, where there's not a particular, set, goal.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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 p...”

“When you're travelling, you are what you are right there and then. People don't have your past to hold against you. No yesterdays on the road.”