Home > Work > Blue Highways
41 " Inside one of the white-walled rooms, a woman, forlorn in the quiet economy of things, sat staring numbly through the miasma of her cigarette into the March grayness. "
― William Least Heat-Moon , Blue Highways
42 " 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. "
43 " Tell me what's the hardest thing about living on a small, marshy island in Chesapeake Bay.I know that and it didn't take sixty three years to figure it out... Having the gumption to live different and the sense to let everybody else live different. That's the hardest thing, hands down. "
44 " 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. "
45 " Over west to Elephant Butte, up off the Rio Grande. Just a greenhorn, sleepin’ out where we was movin’ cattle. July of ’forty-five. They was a high wind that night and rain, and I didn’t get much sleep. Curled up against a big rock out of the wind. I was still in my bedroll at daybreak when come a god-terrible flash. I jumped up figurin’ one of the boys took a flashbulb pitcher of me sleepin’ on the job. Course nobody had a Kodak. Couple minutes later the ground started rumblin’. We heard plenty of TNT goin’ off to Almagordy before, but we never heard nothin’ like that noise. Sound just kept roarin’. ‘Oh, Jesus,’ I says, ‘what’d they go and do now?’ Next month we saw wheres they bombed Heerosaykee, Japan. We never knowed what an A-tomic bomb was, but we knowed that one flash wasn’t no TNT blockbuster.” “The "
46 " Without trees and isolation, you lose the mystery "