I just use my life story as a kind of device on which to hang comic observations. It’s not my interest or instinct to tell the world anything pertinent about myself or my family.
BILL BRYSONYou don’t have to know anything about baseball to respond to Babe Ruth because he’s just this magnificent human being.
More Bill Bryson Quotes
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America has never quite grasped that you can live in a place without making it ugly, that beauty doesn’t have to be confined behind fences, as if a national park were a sort of zoo for nature.
BILL BRYSON -
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.
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We are so used to the notion of our own inevitability as life’s dominant species that it is hard to grasp that we are here only because of timely extraterrestrial bangs and other random flukes.
BILL BRYSON -
Enough to explode with the force of thirty very large hydrogen bombs, assuming you knew how to liberate it and really wished to make a point.
BILL BRYSON -
To my mind, the greatest reward and luxury of travel is to be able to experience everyday things as if for the first time, to be in a position in which almost nothing is so familiar it is taken for granted.
BILL BRYSON -
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.
BILL BRYSON -
I understand cricket – what’s going on, the scoring – but I can’t understand why.
BILL BRYSON -
In the countryside, litter doesn’t have a friend. It doesn’t have anybody who’s saying, ‘Wait a minute, this is really starting to get out of control.’
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It was the kind of pure, undiffused light that can only come from a really hot blue sky, the kind that makes even a concrete highway painful to behold and turns every distant reflective surface into a little glint of flame.
BILL BRYSON -
Life just wants to be; but it doesn’t want to be much.
BILL BRYSON -
It is the only sport that shares its name with an insect. It is the only sport in which spectators burn as many calories as players – more if they are moderately restless.
BILL BRYSON -
I still had my family, or at least the remnants of a family ripped apart by divorce and then glued back together in various odd arrangements through a series of ill- advised remarriages. It was good to know I had a solid foundation.
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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.
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So, if people didn’t settle down to take up farming, why then did they embark on this entirely new way of living? We have no idea – or actually, we have lots of ideas, but we don’t know if any of them are right.
BILL BRYSON -
That’s the trouble with losing your mind; by the time it’s gone, it’s too late to get it back.
BILL BRYSON