I wanted to see what was out there. All over America today people would be dragging themselves to work, stuck in traffic jams, wreathed in exhaust smoke. I was going for a walk in the woods. I was more than ready for this.
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.
More Bill Bryson Quotes
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You don’t have to know anything about baseball to respond to Babe Ruth because he’s just this magnificent human being.
BILL BRYSON -
America has never quite grasped that you can live in a place without making it ugly, that beauty doesn’t have to be confined behind fences, as if a national park were a sort of zoo for nature.
BILL BRYSON -
Most of what has lived on Earth has left behind no record at all.
BILL BRYSON -
Now they are a little like those desperate junkies who have tried every known drug and are finally reduced to mainlining toilet bowl cleanser in an effort to get still higher.
BILL BRYSON -
I mused for a few moments on the question of which was worse, to lead a life so boring that you are easily enchanted, or a life so full of stimulus that you are easily bored.
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 -
So that buildings and structures you normally pass without a glance suddenly become arresting, even beautiful? Well, they seem to have that light in Australia nearly all the time.
BILL BRYSON -
A sign in the yard of a church next door said CHRIST IS THE ANSWER. (The question, of course, is: What do you say when you strike your thumb with a hammer?)
BILL BRYSON -
I must say, so long as the car is not actually moving. However, as soon as you put the car in motion … everything slides off … It can hold nothing that has not been nailed to it. So I ask you: what then is it for?
BILL BRYSON -
Australians are very unfair in this way. They spend half of any conversation insisting that the country’s dangers are vastly overrated and that there’s nothing to worry about.
BILL BRYSON -
I understand now, in a way I never did before, the colossal scale of the world. I found patience and fortitude that I didn’t know I had. I discovered an America that millions of people scarcely know exists. I made a friend. I came home.
BILL BRYSON -
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.
BILL BRYSON -
Life just wants to be; but it doesn’t want to be much.
BILL BRYSON -
In the countryside, litter doesn’t have a friend. It doesn’t have anybody who’s saying, ‘Wait a minute, this is really starting to get out of control.’
BILL BRYSON -
There is no such thing, incidentally, as one kudo.
BILL BRYSON