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 BRYSONThe first book I did – the first successful book – was a kind of a travel book, and publishers in Britain encouraged me to do more.
More Bill Bryson Quotes
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But I got a great deal else from the experience. I learned to pitch a tent and sleep beneath the stars. For a brief, proud period I was slender and fit. I gained a profound respect for the wilderness and nature and the benign dark power of woods.
BILL BRYSON -
I have long known that it is part of God’s plan for me to spend a little time with each of the most stupid people on earth.
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 -
Traveling makes you realize what an immeasurably nice place much of America could be if only people possessed the same instinct for preservation as they do in Europe.
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 -
In France, a chemist named Pilatre de Rozier tested the flammability of hydrogen by gulping a mouthful and blowing across an open flame, proving at a stroke that hydrogen is indeed explosively combustible and that eyebrows are not necessarily a permanent feature of one’s face.
BILL BRYSON -
Time, you discover, has wrought changes that leave you feeling mildly foolish and out of touch.
BILL BRYSON -
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.
BILL BRYSON -
Correct me if I’m wrong, but you would think that if one nation ought by now to have mastered the science of drainage, Britain would be it.
BILL BRYSON -
At a conference of sociologists in America in 1977, love was defined as “the cognitive-affective state characterized by intrusive and obsessive fantasizing concerning reciprocity of amorant feelings by the object of the amorance.”.
BILL BRYSON -
…and it occurred to me, with the forcefulness of a thought experienced in 360 degrees, that that’s really what history mostly is: masses of people doing ordinary things.
BILL BRYSON -
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.
BILL BRYSON -
What is it about maps? I could look at them all day, earnestly studying the names of towns and villages I have never heard of and will never visit.
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 -
In order to perpetuate the only possible sequence of hereditary combinations that could result — eventually, astoundingly, and all too briefly — in you.
BILL BRYSON







