105 Quotes by William Least Heat-Moon

Astrology is for those bored by astronomy, but fascinated with themselves.

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.

At any particular moment in a man's life, he can say that everything he has done and has not done, that has been done and not been done to him, has brought him to this 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.

Ego, craving distinction, belongs to the narrowness of now; but self, looking for union, belongs to the past and future, to the continuum, to the outside. Of all the visions of the Grandfathers, the greatest is this: To seek the high concord, a man looks not deeper within - he reaches farther out.

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 to talk into the Great Primal Ears - if Ears there be - music and silence must be the best way.

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.

Memory is each man's own last measure, and for some, the only achievement.

From a mere vacation, one goes home older, but from true travel one returns changed by challenge.

Sitting full in the moment, I practiced on the god-awful difficulty of just paying attention. 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.