Bill Bryson Quotes
I can't think of anything that excites a greater sense of childlike wonder than to be in a country where you are ignorant of almost everything.
There are only three things that can kill a farmer: lightning, rolling over in a tractor, and old age.
If you can imagine a man having a vasectomy without anesthetic to the sound of frantic sitar-playing, you will have some idea of what popular Turkish music is like.
That's the trouble with losing your mind; by the time it's gone, it's too late to get it back.
Hunters will tell you that a moose is a wily and ferocious forest creature. Nonsense. A moose is a cow drawn by a three-year-old.
Of all the things I am not very good at, living in the real world is perhaps the most outstanding.
Physics is really nothing more than a search for ultimate simplicity, but so far all we have is a kind of elegant messiness.
Why is it, I wondered, that old people are always so self-centered and excitable? But I just smiled benignly and stood back, comforted by the thought that soon they would be dead.
Language is more fashion than science, and matters of usage, spelling and pronunciation tend to wander around like hemlines.
We forget just how painfully dim the world was before electricity. A candle, a good candle, provides barely a hundredth of the illumination of a single 100 watt light bulb.
My first rule of travel is never to go to a place that sounds like a medical condition and Critz is clearly an incurable disease involving flaking skin.
Making English grammar conform to Latin rules is like asking people to play baseball using the rules of football.
Boston's freeway system is insane. It was clearly designed by a person who had spent his childhood crashing toy trains.
English grammar is so complex and confusing for the one very simple reason that its rules and terminology are based on Latin, a language with which it has precious little in common.
There are things you just can't do in life. You can't beat the phone company, you can't make a waiter see you until he's ready to see you, and you can't go home again.
I have long known that it is part of God's plan for me to spend a little time with each of the most stupid people on earth.
Perhaps it's my natural pessimism, but it seems that an awfully large part of travel these days is to see things while you still can.
The tearoom lady called me love. All the shop ladies called me love and most of the men called me mate. I hadn't been here twelve hours and already they loved me.
There is no reason why we shouldn't be able to split an infinitive, any more than we should forsake instant coffee and air travel because they weren't available to the Romans.
As the saying goes, it takes all kinds to make the world go around, though perhaps some shouldn't go quite so far around it as others.
Still, I never really mind bad service in a restaurant. It makes me feel better about not leaving a tip.
I had always thought that once you grew up you could do anything you wanted - stay up all night or eat ice-cream straight out of the container.
I love everything about motels. I can't help myself. I still get excited every time I slip a key into a motel room door and fling it open.
The whole of the global economy is based on supplying the cravings of two per cent of the world's population.
More than 300 million people in the world speak English and the rest, it sometimes seems, try to.
As my father always used to tell me, 'You see, son, there's always someone in the world worse off than you.' And I always used to think, 'So?
In terms of adaptability, humans are pretty amazingly useless.
After years of patient study (and with cricket there can be no other kind), I have decided that there is nothing wrong with the game that the introduction of golf carts wouldn't fix in a hurry.
When you tell an Iowan a joke, you can see a kind of race going on between his brain and his expression.
Strange as it may seem, wrote Richard Feynman, we understand the distribution of matter in the interior of the Sun far better than we understand the interior of the Earth.
Look at a globe and what you are seeing really is a snapshot of the continents as they have been for just one-tenth of 1 per cent of the earths history.
...and it occurred to me, with the forcefulness of a thought experienced in 360 degrees, that that's really what history mostly is: masses of people doing ordinary things.
I still enjoy traveling a lot. I mean, it amazes me that I still get excited in hotel rooms just to see what kind of shampoo they've left me.
Energy is liberated matter, matter is energy waiting to happen.
I wanted to quit and to do this forever, sleep in a bed and in a tent, see what was over the next hill and never see a hill again. All of this all at once, every moment, on the trail or off.
The food is excellent. The beer is cold. The sun nearly always shines. There is coffee on every corner. Life doesn’t get much better than this.
Taxonomy is described sometimes as a science and sometimes as an art, but really it’s a battleground.
Human beings would split the atom and invent television, nylon, and instant coffee before they could figure out the age of their own planet.
I don't know whether I'm misanthropic. It seems to me I'm constantly disappointed. I'm very easily disappointed.
America is a great disappointment to me. As I said in one of my books, other societies create civilisations; we build shopping malls.
The average Southerner has the speech patterns of someone slipping in and out of consciousness. I can change my shoes and socks faster than most people in Mississippi can speak a sentence.