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“Someone had told me, years ago, that Key West’s latitude was the northernmost from which the Southern Cross was visible. I had glimpsed it just once, in 1980, while on a night swordfishing trip in the Gulf Stream. It hung a hand’s width above the horizon in the southwest—four stars like the points of a crystal kite. On”
― The Longest Road: Overland in Search of America, from Key West to the Arctic Ocean
― The Longest Road: Overland in Search of America, from Key West to the Arctic Ocean
“What finger-shaped Florida lacks in breadth it makes up for in length; Tallahassee is 480 miles from Miami (farther than New York City is from Cleveland).”
― The Longest Road: Overland in Search of America, from Key West to the Arctic Ocean
― The Longest Road: Overland in Search of America, from Key West to the Arctic Ocean
“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”
― Blue Highways: A Journey into America
― Blue Highways: A Journey into America
“I had only one hard-and-fast rule: avoid interstates. They are predictable and boring, and their uniformity somehow erases changes in landscape; you can drive six hundred miles, from forests into desert, and feel that you haven’t gone anywhere. In a sense, you haven’t. You have no idea about the lives of the people in the towns and cities you’ve bypassed at seventy miles an hour. *”
― The Longest Road: Overland in Search of America, from Key West to the Arctic Ocean
― The Longest Road: Overland in Search of America, from Key West to the Arctic Ocean
“The total distance—11,741 miles—gave me sticker shock. Round it up to twelve thousand. Almost halfway around the world! It seemed slightly mad, but then it might do me good. To make such an epic road trip, discovering places I’d never been, rediscovering others, never knowing what I’d find beyond the next curve or hill, would be to recapture the enchantment of youth, a sense of promise and possibility. The cicada chirped incessantly in my head. I clicked back to the first map. Looking at it brought on a mixture of eagerness and reluctance. The buzzing grew more shrill. If you don’t go now, geezer, you never will. I listened to my inner cicada, and the uneasiness subsided. If I’d learned anything, it was that the things you do never cause as much regret as the things you don’t. But”
― The Longest Road: Overland in Search of America, from Key West to the Arctic Ocean
― The Longest Road: Overland in Search of America, from Key West to the Arctic Ocean
Chris’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at Chris’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
550 books
|
155 friends
306 books
|
169 friends
2,308 books
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263 friends
33 books
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135 friends
73 books
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30 friends
2 books
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62 friends
156 books
|
90 friends
659 books
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6 friends
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