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

Every kid I knew had a father with a little stash of men’s magazines which the father thought was secret and which the kid knew all about.

An awful lot of England is slowly eroding, in ways that I find really distressing, and an awful lot of it is the hedgerows…

I refer of course to the soaring wonder of the age known as the Eiffel Tower. Never in history has a structure been more technologically advanced, materially obsolescent, and gloriously pointless all at the same time.

A significant fraction of thru-hikers reach Katahdin, then turn around and start back to Georgia. They just can’t stop walking, which kind of makes you wonder.

The remarkable position in which we find ourselves is that we don’t actually know what we actually know.

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

The world, you realize, is enormous in a way that only you and a small community of fellow hikers know. Planetary scale is your little secret.

Romans park their cars the way I would park if I had just spilled a beaker of hydrochloric acid on my lap.

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.

There is no such thing, incidentally, as one kudo.

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,

We used to build civilizations. Now we build shopping malls.

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.

This was 1990, the year that communism died in Europe and it seemed strange to me that in all the words that were written about the fall of the iron curtain, nobody anywhere lamented that it was the end of a noble experiment.

Not one of your pertinent ancestors was squashed, devoured, drowned, starved, stranded, stuck fast, untimely wounded, or otherwise deflected from its life’s quest of delivering a tiny charge of genetic material to the right partner at the right moment.

Christmas tree stands are the work of the devil and they want you dead.

Humor is the chocolate chips in the ice cream of life.

Every time I look into his eyes I just want to take the ice cream or whatever I’ve got in my hand and rub it into his face. That’s how much I like him.

You can cry for a little bit, eat some ice cream, but I think, after that, it’s like, get up, listen to some powerful music and do something that makes you happy, be productive.

Thankfully, I’m lucky enough to be able to eat ice cream.

When you write, produce, engineer and mix everything yourself, it tends to take a long time to do anything

I don’t think I’ve ever seen pie advertised. That’s how you know it’s good. They advertise ice cream and other desserts.

I was so unhealthy. I used to go to ‘Cold Stone Creamery,’ get a tub of Butterfinger ice cream, and eat it all before bedtime. And my fingers were permanently stained orange from Cheetos.

I dont want to be a leader. I want to sell ice cream.