Quotes
List here any quote, from William Least Heat-Moon's book Blue Highways. Quotes that inspire you, or give you a strong visual image, or maybe you just admire the author's use of words
. . . poetic, lyrical, straightforward, cultural, etc . . .
We are reading Blue Highways in celebration of William Least Heat-Moon's birthday: August 27, 1939. “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 Writing Blue Highways: William Least Heat-Moon - May 28, 2014
Maybe America should make the national bird a Kentucky Fried Leghorn and put Ronald McDonald on the dollar bill.
ReplyDelete. . . 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.
ReplyDeleteBecause they cared more about adapting to the cosmos than to a society bereft of restraint, the Shakers —like the red man— could love craft and yet never become materialists.
ReplyDeleteClumps of wild garlic lined the county highway that I hoped was Shepardsville Road. It scrimmaged with the mountain as it tried to stay on top of the ridges; the hillsides were so steep and thick with oak. I felt as if I was following a trail through the misty treetops. Chickens doing more work with their necks than legs, ran across the road, and, with a battering of wings, half leapt and half flew into the lower branches of oaks. A vicious pair of mixed-breed German shepherds raced along trying to eat the tires.
ReplyDelete“. . . it’s a grudgin’ land —like the gourd. Got to hard cuss gourd seed, they say, to get it up out of the ground.” (Madison Wheeler - Nameless, TN)
ReplyDelete“I got some bad ham meat one day,” Miss Ginny said, “and took to vomitin’. All day, all night. Hangin’ on the drop edge of yonder. I said to Thurmond, ‘Thurmond, unless you want shut of me, call the doctor.’”
ReplyDeleteShe knows county history better than a turtle knows his shell.
ReplyDeleteIf God isn’t a Tarheel, why is the sky Carolina blue?
ReplyDeleteThis country don’t get up in the air no higher than a boy can throw a mud turtle.
ReplyDeleteI had a powerful sense of life going about the business of getting on with itself. Pointed phallic sprouts pressed up out of the ooze, green vegetable heads came up from the mire to sniff for vegetation of kin. Staminate and pistillate, they rose to the thrall of the oldest rhythms. Things were growing so fast I could almost feel the heat from their generation: the slow friction of leaf against bud case, petal against petal. For some time I stood among the high mysteries of being as they consumed the decay of old life.
ReplyDeleteHis skin shone like wet delta mud and his smile glittered like a handful of new dimes.
ReplyDelete. . . under a low gray sky, highway 79 stretched out like a dead snake. I watched the empty road and hated the solitude. The wanderer’s danger is to find comfort.
ReplyDelete“Barber’s the third most lied to person, you know.”
ReplyDelete“Who’s first?”
“Man’s wife is first anywhere in the world. Priest is second.”
What is it in man that for a long while lies unknown and unseen only one day to emerge and push himself 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 of 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.
ReplyDeleteMaybe experience is like a globe — you can’t go the wrong way if you travel far enough.
ReplyDelete. . . what you’ve done becomes the judge of what you’re going to do — especially in other peoples minds. When you’re traveling, you are what you are a right there in then. People don’t have your past to hold against you. No yesterday‘s on the road.
ReplyDeleteThe other day . . . I remembered some thing from when I was a little kid that I didn’t understand then. My dad was stuffing me into a snowsuit like parents do — this arm, that arm. When he had me in, he looked at me so long it scared me. Whatever he saw made him shudder.
ReplyDeleteNow I know what it meant.
. . . He knew what I was going to know.
Love can make fathers shudder.
“I can’t take it anymore” comes just before “I don’t give a damn.” Let the caring snap, let it break all to hell. Caring breaks before the man if he can only wait it out.
ReplyDelete