I can’t think of anything that excites a greater sense of childlike wonder than to be in a country where you are ignorant of almost everything.
BILL BRYSONI always wanted to do a baseball book; I love baseball. The problem is that a very large part of my following is in non-baseball playing countries.
More Bill Bryson Quotes
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Des Moines is a mecca of cosmopolitanism, a dynamic hub of wealth and education, where people wear three-piece suits and dark socks, often simultaneously.
BILL BRYSON -
Des Moines is like your typical American city; it’s just these concentric circles of malls, built outward from the city.
BILL BRYSON -
The average Southerner has the speech patterns of someone slipping in and out of consciousness. I can change my shoes and socks faster than most people in Mississippi can speak a sentence.
BILL BRYSON -
Science has been quite embattled. It’s the most important thing there is. An arts graduate is not going to fix global warming. They may do other valuable things, but they are not going to fix the planet or cure cancer or get rid of malaria.
BILL BRYSON -
When the poet Paul Valery once asked Albert Einstein if he kept a notebook to record his ideas, Einstein looked at him with mild but genuine surprise. “Oh, that’s not necessary,” he replied . “It’s so seldom I have one.
BILL BRYSON -
Making English grammar conform to Latin rules is like asking people to play baseball using the rules of football.
BILL BRYSON -
But that’s the glory of foreign travel, as far as I am concerned. I don’t want to know what people are talking about. I can’t think of anything that excites a greater sense of childlike wonder than to be in a country where you are ignorant of almost everything.
BILL BRYSON -
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.
BILL BRYSON -
As a rule of thumb, I would submit that if you need to call your floss provider, for any reason, you are probably not ready for this level of oral hygiene.
BILL BRYSON -
I think it’s only right that crazy people should have their own city, but I cannot for the life of me see why a sane person would want to go there.
BILL BRYSON -
They make you feel small & confused & vulnerable, like a small child lost in a crowd of strange legs. Stand in a desert or prairie & you know you are in a big space. Stand in the woods and you only sense it. They are vast, featureless nowhere. And they are alive.
BILL BRYSON -
A billion more each came from Buddha and Genghis Khan and Beethoven, and any other historical figure you care to name.
BILL BRYSON -
Most of the time I am sunk in thought, but at some point on each walk there comes a moment when I look up and notice, with a kind of first-time astonishment.
BILL BRYSON -
There seemed to be a mystifying universal conspiracy among textbook authors to make certain the material they dealt with never strayed too near the realm of the mildly interesting and was always at least a long-distance phone call from the frankly interesting.
BILL BRYSON -
We are each so atomically numberous and so vigorously recycled at death that a significant number of our atoms-up to a billion for each of us, it has been suggested-probably once belonged to Shakespeare.
BILL BRYSON