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.
I did learn what I didn’t know I wanted to know.
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.
Education is thinking, and thinking is looking for yourself and seeing what’s there, not what you got told was there.
Don’t go around hurting each other,’ and she said, ‘Try to understand things.
I think it an invaluable advantage to be born and brought up in the neighborhood of some grand and noble object in nature: a river, a lake, or a mountain. We make a friendship with it; we in a manner ally ourselves with it for life.
If a man can keep alert and imaginative, an error is a possibility, a chance at something new; to him, wandering and wondering are part of the same process, and he is most mistaken, most in error, whenever he quits exploring.
American history is parking lots.
I suspected that the Boss embraced one crisis after another because they gave him significance, something like tragic stature. He had so lost belief in a world outside himself that, without crisis, he had nothing worth talking about.
The past is for the present, the present for the future.
Could be, but to a historian, it’s been going since the beginning.
I’ve become the woman after the French tickler.
In the sunny flats, kudzu from last year had climbed to wrap trees and telephone poles in dry, brown leaves. Whole buildings looked as if they had been bagged. Introduced from Japan in the thirties to help control erosion that had damaged eighty-five percent of the tillable land, kudzu has consumed entire fields, and no one has found a good way to stop it. Kudzu and water hyacinth, another Japanese import, have run through Dixie showing less restraint than Sherman.
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.
If you’re gonna run away from home, take a dog along.
The future should grow from the past, not obliterate it.
Americans have just got afraid to taste anything.
Astrology is for those bored by astronomy, but fascinated with themselves.
From a mere vacation, one goes home older, but from true travel one returns changed by challenge.
To insist that diligent thought would bring an understanding of change was to limit life to the comprehensible.
Sometimes a man’s experience is like the sweep second hand on a clock, touching each point in its circuit but always the arcs of movement repeating.