You are going to have a day without even the tiniest of pleasures; you are going to drive across Ohio.
BILL BRYSONYou are going to have a day without even the tiniest of pleasures; you are going to drive across Ohio.
BILL BRYSONIf 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 BRYSONIt isn’t easy to become a fossil. … Only about one bone in a billion, it is thought, becomes fossilized. If that is so, it means that the complete fossil legacy of all the Americans alive today.
BILL BRYSONIn the morning I awoke early and experienced that sinking sensation that overcomes you when you first open your eyes and realize that instead of a normal day ahead of you, with its scatterings of simple gratifications.
BILL BRYSONThis much may have happened many times before. But this ancestral packet did something additional and extraordinary. It cleaved itself and produced an heir.
BILL BRYSONPeople don’t talk like this, theytalklikethis. Syllables, words, sentences run together like a watercolour left in the rain.
BILL BRYSONThe English invented cricket to make other human endeavors look interesting.
BILL BRYSONEnergy is liberated matter, matter is energy waiting to happen.
BILL BRYSONEvery 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.
BILL BRYSONSuddenly you are five years old again. You can’t read anything, you have only the most rudimentary sense of how things work, you can’t even reliably cross a street without endangering your life. Your whole existence becomes a series of interesting guesses.
BILL BRYSONIt 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 BRYSONCorrect 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 BRYSONTraveling 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 BRYSONIt is unthinkable to have a British countryside that doesn’t have actual functioning farmers riding tractors, cows in fields, things like that.
BILL BRYSONPhysics is really nothing more than a search for ultimate simplicity, but so far all we have is a kind of elegant messiness.
BILL BRYSONThe food is excellent. The beer is cold. The sun nearly always shines. There is coffee on every corner. Life doesn’t get much better than this.
BILL BRYSON