Quotes from Blue Highways

“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, quote from 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, quote from Blue Highways

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

“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, quote from 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, quote from 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, quote from Blue Highways

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

“What you've done become the judge of what you're going to do - especially in other people's mind. 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, quote from 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, quote from Blue Highways

“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, quote from Blue Highways

“These are the days that must happen to you,”
― William Least Heat-Moon, quote from Blue Highways

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

“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, quote from Blue Highways

“being Indian means being responsible to my people.”
― William Least Heat-Moon, quote from Blue Highways

“This used to be a spring where women came to boil their wash clothes in iron pots. One time a woman was here they say, abeatin' a rug clean with a stick. Had he daughter along. The little girl disappeared but the woman just figured she was aplayn' hide and seek. the mother was athumpin' her rug when it commenced aturnin' red. She got vexed with the child for hidin' raspberries in the rug. SHe opened it to wash away the stain and her little girl rolled out. child was hid in the rug. Woman run off through the woods acryin'. 'I bludgeoned my baby! I BEAT MY BABY DEAD!' Next night she come here to a big oak and hung herself with a bedsheet. That sheet, they say, blowed in the trees until it rotted away. Terrified many a man acomin' through at night”
― William Least Heat-Moon, quote from Blue Highways

“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, quote from Blue Highways

“I suspected that the Boss embraced one crisis after another because they gave him significance, something like tragic stature. He had so lost belief in a world outside himself that, without crisis, he had nothing worth talking about.”
― William Least Heat-Moon, quote from 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, quote from Blue Highways

“The past is for the present, the present for the future.”
― William Least Heat-Moon, quote from Blue Highways

“The nature of things is resistance to change, while the nature of process is resistance to stasis,”
― William Least Heat-Moon, quote from Blue Highways

“road so crooked it could run for the legislature,”
― William Least Heat-Moon, quote from Blue Highways

“Could be, but to a historian, it’s been going since the beginning.”
― William Least Heat-Moon, quote from Blue Highways

“I’ve become the woman after the French tickler.”
― William Least Heat-Moon, quote from Blue Highways

“In the sunny flats, kudzu from last year had climbed to wrap trees and telephone poles in dry, brown leaves. Whole buildings looked as if they had been bagged. Introduced from Japan in the thirties to help control erosion that had damaged eighty-five percent of the tillable land, kudzu has consumed entire fields, and no one has found a good way to stop it. Kudzu and water hyacinth, another Japanese import, have run through Dixie showing less restraint than Sherman.”
― William Least Heat-Moon, quote from Blue Highways

“Versi di un canto Navajo

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

“Americans have just got afraid to taste anything.”
― William Least Heat-Moon, quote from Blue Highways

“I notice you use 'work' and 'job' interchangeably. oughten to do that. A job's what you force yourself to pay attention to for money. With work, you don't have to force yourself. (Man dining at Claudia Sanders Dinner House)”
― William Least Heat-Moon, quote from Blue Highways

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“Sabes qual é o erro que cometemos sempre? Acreditar que a vida é imutável, que, mal escolhemos um carril, temos de o seguir até ao fim. Contudo, o destino tem muito mais imaginação do que nós... Precisamente quando se pensa que se está num beco sem saída, quando se atinge o cúmulo do desespero, com a velocidade de uma rajada de vento tudo muda, tudo se transforma, e de um momento para o outro damos por nós a viver uma nova vida.

[…]

Se, esteja onde estiver, arranjar maneira de te ver, só ficarei triste, como fico triste sempre que vejo uma vida desperdiçada, uma vida em que o caminho do amor não conseguiu cumprir-se. Tem cuidado contigo. Sempre que à medida que fores crescendo, tiveres vontade de converter as coisas erradas em certas, lembra-te que a primeira revolução a fazer é dentro de nós próprios, a primeira e a mais importante. Lutar por uma ideia sem se ter uma ideia de si próprio é uma das coisas mais perigosas que se pode fazer.

Quando te sentires perdida, confusa, pensa nas árvores, lembra-te da forma como crescem. Lembra-te que uma árvore com muita ramagem e poucas raízes é derrubada à primeira rajada de vento, e que a linfa custa a correr numa árvore com muitas raízes e pouca ramagem. As raízes e os ramos devem crescer de igual modo, deves estar nas coisas e estar sobre as coisas, só assim poderás dar sombra e abrigo, só assim, na estação apropriada, poderás cobrir-te de flores e de frutos.

E quando à tua frente se abrirem muitas estradas e não souberes a que hás-de escolher, não metas por uma ao acaso, senta-te e espera. Respira com a mesma profundidade confiante com que respiraste no dia em que vieste ao mundo, e sem deixares que nada te distraia, espera e volta a esperar. Fica quieta, em silêncio, e ouve o teu coração. Quando ele te falar, levanta-te, e vai onde ele te levar.”
― Susanna Tamaro, quote from Follow Your Heart

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