When I awoke it was daylight. The inside of my tent was coated in a curious flaky rime, which I realized after a moment was all of my nighttime snores, condensed and frozen and pasted to the fabric, as if into a scrapbook of respiratory memories.
BILL BRYSONFor most of us the rules of English grammar are at best a dimly remembered thing. But even for those who make the rules, grammatical correctitude sometimes proves easier to urge than to achieve.
More Bill Bryson Quotes
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Absolute brain size does not tell you everything or possibly sometimes even much. Elephants and whales both have brains larger than ours, but you wouldn’t have much trouble outwitting them in contract negotiations.
BILL BRYSON -
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 -
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 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.
BILL BRYSON -
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.
BILL BRYSON -
You are going to have a day without even the tiniest of pleasures; you are going to drive across Ohio.
BILL BRYSON -
Every twenty minutes on the Appalachian Trail, Katz and I walked farther than the average American walks in a week. For 93 percent of all trips outside the home, for whatever distance or whatever purpose,
BILL BRYSON -
A third…candidate for Shakespearean authorship was Christopher Marlowe. He was the right age (just two months older than Shakespeare), had the requisite talent, and would certainly have had ample leisure after 1593, assuming he wasn’t too dead to work.
BILL BRYSON -
But what is life to a lichen ? Yet its impulse to exist, to be, is every bit as strong as ours arguably even stronger. If I were told that I had to spend decades being a furry growth on a rock in the woods, I believe I would lose the will to go on.
BILL BRYSON -
Columbus real achievement was managing to cross the ocean successfully in both directions. Though an accomplished enough mariner, he was not terribly good at a great deal else, especially geography, the skill that would seem most vital in an explorer.
BILL BRYSON -
There are only three things that can kill a farmer: lightning, rolling over in a tractor, and old age.
BILL BRYSON -
Every dog on the face of the earth wants me dead.
BILL BRYSON -
Every last bit of it, good and bad – old churches, country lanes, people saying ‘Mustn’t grumble,’ and ‘I’m terribly sorry but,’ people apologizing to ME when I conk them with a careless elbow, milk in bottles, beans on toast, haymaking in June, seaside piers.
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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 -
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.
BILL BRYSON







