William Least Heat-Moon
William Least Heat-Moon
William Least Heat-Moon, also named William Lewis Trogdon, is an American travel writer and historian of English, Irish, and Osage ancestry. He is the author of various bestselling books of topographical U.S. travel writing...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionWriter
Date of Birth27 August 1939
CountryUnited States of America
writing quests hunts
For me, writing is not a search for explanations but a ramble in quest of what informs a place, a hunt for equivalents.
change blue color
On the old highway maps of America, the main routes were red and the back roads blue. Now even the colors are changing.
men wander insight
Instead of insight, maybe all a man gets is strength to wander for a while.
sweet sea perception
One of the sweet and expectable aspects of life afloat is the perpetual present moment one lives in and a perception that time is nothing more than the current, an eternal flowing back to the sea.
stupid sleep men
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.
sight dust telescopes
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?
vision way turns
New ways of seeing can disclose new things… But turn the question around. Do new things make for new ways of seeing?
discovery errors joy
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.
travel carpe-diem past
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.
lying eye men
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.
travel adventure easy
Be careful going in search of adventure - it's ridiculously easy to find.