black
grey
blue
red
brown
white

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?

Bill Bryson

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.
BILL BRYSON

Essentially Good Orphan Player Story Successful
You may not feel outstandingly robust, but if you are an average-sized adult you will contain within your modest frame no less than 7 X 10^18 joules of potential energy.
BILL BRYSON

Average Bomb Energy Hydrogen
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.
BILL BRYSON

Hunters Nature Years
Most scientists are without exception adorably quirky, and one of the ways of making it more accessible was to try to get readers interested in the person.
BILL BRYSON

Exception Quirky Scientist Trying Way
I don’t know whether I’m misanthropic. It seems to me I’m constantly disappointed. I’m very easily disappointed. Disappointed in the things that people do; disappointed in the things that people construct. I want things to be better all the time.
BILL BRYSON

Disappointed Misanthropic People Time Want
America is a very seductive place in terms of lifestyle and comfort, but it wasn’t for me.
BILL BRYSON

Comfort Country Seductive
It had no practical application in his lifetime, but today, thanks to computers, is routinely used in the modelling of climate change, astrophysics and stock-market analysis.
BILL BRYSON

Analysis Astrophysics Market Modelling Practical Social
A sign in the yard of a church next door said CHRIST IS THE ANSWER. (The question, of course, is: What do you say when you strike your thumb with a hammer?)
BILL BRYSON

Church Doors Yards
When each winding back highway and plump hillside is suddenly and infinitely splashed with every sharp shade that nature can bestow – flaming scarlet, lustrous gold, throbbing vermilion, fiery orange.
BILL BRYSON

Bestow Hobbing Nature Orange Shade Vermilion
You are going to have a day without even the tiniest of pleasures; you are going to drive across Ohio.
BILL BRYSON

Across Country Even Going Without
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.
BILL BRYSON

Dawn Father Nostalgia Overcome Overcoming
That is jargon – the practice of never calling a spade a spade when you might instead call it a manual earth-restructuring implement – and it is one of the great curses of modern English.
BILL BRYSON

Cruise English Implement Modern Restructuring
Suddenly, in the space of a moment, I realized what it was that I loved about Britain – which is to say, all of it.
BILL BRYSON

Country Loved Sorry Suddenly Summer
Even though sugar was very expensive, people consumed it till their teeth turned black, and if their teeth didn’t turn black naturally, they blackened them artificially to show how wealthy and marvelously self-indulgent they were.
BILL BRYSON

Black People Self
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

Illumination Light World
South Dakota… is like the world’s first drive-through sensory deprivation chamber.
BILL BRYSON

Deprivation Firsts World

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?

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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?

Related Topics

Popular Authors

More Bill Bryson Quotes