8 Quotes & Sayings By William Least Heatmoon

William Least Heat-Moon was a poet and author of more than twenty books. He is best known for his books Blue Highways, Blue Ringer, and The Blue Highways Revisited. In 1953, he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. In 1957, the University of Colorado gave him an honorary degree Read more

In 1958, President Eisenhower appointed him to the National Council on the Arts. In 1960, William joined the faculty of Colorado College as a professor of English and English as a Second Language.

1
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 HeatMoon
2
All of those things - rock and men and river - resisted change, resisted the coming as they did the going. Hood warmed and rose slowly, breaking open the plain, and cooled slowly over the plain it buried. The nature of things is resistance to change, while the nature of process is resistance to stasis, yet things and process are one, and the line from inorganic to organic and back is uninterrupted and unbroken. William Least HeatMoon
3
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 HeatMoon
4
Memory is each man's own last measure, and for some, the only achievement. William Least HeatMoon
5
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 HeatMoon
6
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. William Least HeatMoon
7
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 HeatMoon