William Lewis Trogdon Quotes
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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.
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Instead of insight, maybe all a man gets is strength to wander for a while.
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Boredom lies only with the traveler's limited perception and his failure to explore deeply enough. After a while, I found my perception limited.
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I like the digressive kind of traveling, where there's not a particular, set, goal.
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The four horsemen of the prairie are tornado, locust, drought, and fire, and the greatest of these is fire, a rider with two faces because for everything taken, it makes a return in equal measure.
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At the beginning we learn to travel, then we travel to learn.
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To an American, land is solidity, goodness, and hope. American history is about land.
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Historical awareness is a kind of resurrection.
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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.
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On the old highway maps of America, the main routes were red and the back roads blue. Now even the colors are changing.
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The thing that overwhelms me when I go out now is the sprawlation of America.
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I have not been on any river that has more of a distinctive personality than does the Missouri River. It's a river that immediately presents to the traveler, 'I am a grandfather spirit. I have a source; I have a life.
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You never feel better than when you start feeling good after you've been feeling bad.
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Memory is each man's own last measure, and for some, the only achievement.
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The hotel was once where things coalesced, where you could meet both townspeople and travelers. Not so in a motel. No matter how you build it, the motel remains the haunt of the quick and dirty, where the only locals are Chamber of Commerce boys every fourth Thursday. Who ever heard the returning traveler exclaim over one of the great motels of the world he stayed in? Motels can be big, but never grand.
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Other than to amuse himself, why should a man pretend to know where he's going or understand what he sees?
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A true journey, no matter how long the travel takes, has no end.
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I did learn what I didn't know I wanted to know.
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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.
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Be careful going in search of adventure - it's ridiculously easy to find.
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One of the sweet and expectable aspects of life afloat is the perpetual present moment one lives in and a perception that time is nothing more than the current, an eternal flowing back to the sea.
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At any particular moment in a man's life, he can say that everything he has done and not done, that has been done and not been done to him, has brought him to that 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.
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Get out and find ...the country. And ourselves.
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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.