Blue Highways
William Least Heat-Moon
Top 10 Best Quotes
“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.”
“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.”
“The biggest hindrance to learning is fear of showing one's self a fool.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Memory is each man's own last measure, and for some, the only achievement.”
“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").”
“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.”
“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.”
“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”
Except where otherwise noted, all rights reserved to the author(s) of this book (mentioned above). The content of this page serves solely as promotional material for the aforementioned book. If you enjoyed these quotes, you can support the author(s) by acquiring the full book from Amazon.
Book Keywords:
memoir, road-trips, personal-growth, america, american-literature, travel, travel-writing, oneness, ego
