For me, writing is not a search for explanations but a ramble in quest of what informs a place, a hunt for equivalents.
Instead of insight, maybe all a man gets is strength to wander for a while.
A man who couldn’t make things go right could at least go. He could quit trying to get out of the way of life. Chuck routine. Live the real jeopardy of circumstance. It was a question of dignity.
You never feel better than when you start feeling good after you’ve been feeling bad.
Our religion keeps reminding us that we aren’t just will and thoughts. We’re also sand and wind and thunder. Rain. The seasons. All those things. You learn to respect everything because you are everything. If you respect yourself, you respect all things.
To an American, land is solidity, goodness, and hope. American history is about land.
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.
New ways of seeing can disclose new things: the radio telescope revealed quasars and pulsars, and the scanning electron microscope showed the whiskers of the dust mite. But turn the question around: Do new things make for new ways of seeing?
Instead of insight, maybe all a man gets is strength to wander for a while. Maybe the only gift is a chance to inquire, to know nothing for certain. An inheritance of wonder and nothing more.
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.
Life doesn’t happen along interstates. It’s against the law.
Whoever the last true cowboy in America turns out to be, he’s likely to be an Indian.
I can’t say, over the miles, that I had learned what I had wanted to know because I hadn’t known what I wanted to know. But I did learn what I didn’t know I wanted to know.
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.
Historical awareness is a kind of resurrection.
At the beginning we learn to travel, then we travel to learn.
The open road is a beckoning, a strangeness, a place where a man can lose himself.
To say nothing is out here is incorrect; to say the desert is stingy with everything except space and light, stone and earth is closer to the truth.
Memory is each man’s own last measure, and for some, the only achievement.