Bill Bryson Quotes - Page 8

Where I grew up, in Des Moines, Iowa, there is hardly any downtown economic activity now. Everybody shops in malls - you don't find a sense of community in malls.

Woods are not like other spaces. To begin with, they are cubic. Their trees surround you, loom over you, press in from all sides. Woods choke off views & leave you muddled & without bearings. They make you feel small & confused & vulnerable, like a small child lost in a crowd of strange legs. Stand in a desert or prairie & you know you are in a big space. Stand in the woods and you only sense it. They are vast, featureless nowhere. And they are alive.

It is a curious feature of our existance that we come from a planet that is very good at promoting life but even better at extinguishing it.

Beulah has a husband?' I know. It's a miracle. There can't be more than two people on the planet who'd be willing to sleep with her, and here we are both in the same town.

Life just wants to be; but it doesn't want to be much.

There'd never been a more advantageous time to be a criminal in America than during the 13 years of Prohibition. At a stroke, the American government closed down the fifth largest industry in the United States - alcohol production - and just handed it to criminals - a pretty remarkable thing to do.

I became quietly seized with that nostalgia that overcomes you when you have reached the middle of your life and your father has recently died and it dawns on you that when he went he took some of you with him.

If you drive to, say, Shenandoah National Park, or the Great Smoky Mountains, you'll get some appreciation for the scale and beauty of the outdoors. When you walk into it, then you see it in a completely different way. You discover it in a much slower, more majestic sort of way.

You don't have to know anything about baseball to respond to Babe Ruth because he's just this magnificent human being. And a really good story because he was this kid who grew up essentially as an orphan, you know, had a tough life, and then he became the most successful baseball player ever. But he was also a really good guy.

Yes, U.S. travelers dress better. The British are always so conspicuous in hot climates. They don't seem to wear shorts. American men seem to be comfortable wearing hot-weather clothing.

There seemed to be a mystifying universal conspiracy among textbook authors to make certain the material they dealt with never strayed too near the realm of the mildly interesting and was always at least a long-distance phone call from the frankly interesting.

When you sit in a chair, you are not actually sitting there, but levitating above it at a height of one angstrom (a hundred millionth of a centimetre), your electrons and its electrons implacably opposed to any closer intimacy.

On the dashboard of our family car is a shallow indentation about the size of a paperback book. If you are looking for somewhere to put your sunglasses or spare change, it is the obvious place, and it works extremely well, I must say, so long as the car is not actually moving. However, as soon as you put the car in motion ... everything slides off ... It can hold nothing that has not been nailed to it. So I ask you: what then is it for?

Taxonomy is described sometimes as a science and sometimes as an art, but really it’s a battleground.

Our instinct may be to see the impossibility of tracking everything down as frustrating, dispiriting, perhaps even appalling, but it can just as well be viewed as almost unbearably exciting. We live on a planet that has a more or less infinite capacity to surprise. What reasoning person could possibly want it any other way?

I can't imagine there has ever been a more gratifying time or place to be alive than America in the 1950s. No country had ever known such prosperity.

I always wanted to do a baseball book; I love baseball. The problem is that a very large part of my following is in non-baseball playing countries.

For a long time, I'd been vaguely fascinated by the idea that Charles Lindbergh flew the Atlantic and Babe Ruth hit 60 home runs in the same summer.

I don't know whether I'm misanthropic. It seems to me I'm constantly disappointed. I'm very easily disappointed.

18th century scientists, the French in particular, seldom did things simply if an absurdly demanding alternative was available.

I have a small tattered clipping that I sometimes carry with meand pull out for purposes of privateamusement. It's a weather forecast from theWestern Daily Mail and it says, in toto: 'Outlook: Dry and warm, but cooler with some rain.

Nearly a quarter of American men were in the Armed forces. The rest were in school, in prison, or were George W. Bush.

As a rule of thumb, I would submit that if you need to call your floss provider, for any reason, you are probably not ready for this level of oral hygiene.

England was full of words I'd never heard before - streaky bacon, short back and sides, Belisha beacon, serviettes, high tea, ice-cream cornet.

Des Moines is like your typical American city; it's just these concentric circles of malls, built outward from the city.