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Bill Bryson
84 quotes
“I come from Des Moines. Somebody had to.”
Bill Bryson (born 1951) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When you come from Des Moines you either accept the fact without question and settle down with a girl called Bobbi and get a job in the Firestone factory and live there forever and ever or you spend your adolescence moaning at length about what a dump it is and how you can't wait to get out and then you settle down with a local girl named Bobbi and get a job in the Firestone factory and live there forever and ever.”
Bill Bryson (born 1951) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“My father liked Iowa. He lived his whole life in the state, and is even now working his way through eternity there, in Glendale Cemetery in Des Moines.”
Bill Bryson (born 1951) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I had to calm down because a state trooper pulled up alongside me at a traffic light and began looking at me with that sort of casual disdain you often get when you give a dangerously stupid person a gun and a squad car.”
Bill Bryson (born 1951) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I assume he was descended from apes like all the rest of us, but clearly in his case it had been a fairly gentle slope.”
Bill Bryson (born 1951) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I watched a rerun on television of a 1960s comedy programme called "Mr Ed", which was about a talking horse. Judging by the quality of the jokes, I would guess that Mr Ed wrote his own material.”
Bill Bryson (born 1951) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Just down the road stood a little town, which I shall call Dullard lest the people recognize themselves and take me to court or come to my house and batter me with baseball bats.”
Bill Bryson (born 1951) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1951) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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. But then it occurred to me that musing is a pointless waste of anyone's time, and instead I went off to see if I could find a Baby Ruth candy bar, a far more profitable exercise.”
Bill Bryson (born 1951) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“For forty years or so this was the world headquarters of conspicuous consumption.”
Bill Bryson (born 1951) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Much of the tablecloth was a series of grey smudges outlined in a large, irregular patch of yellow that looked distressingly like a urine stain.”
Bill Bryson (born 1951) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We used to build civilizations. Now we build shopping malls.”
Bill Bryson (born 1951) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The best that can be said for Norwegian television is that it gives you the sensation of a coma without the worry and inconvenience.”
Bill Bryson (born 1951) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Bryson. You’ve got three kinds of chromosomes: X, Y and fuck-head. - Katz”
Bill Bryson (born 1951) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I don't care how paranoid and irrational this makes me sound, but I know for a fact that the people of Paris want me dead.”
Bill Bryson (born 1951) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We couldn't place their accents but we thought the smaller one might be Australian since he seemed so at home down under.”
Bill Bryson (born 1951) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Why, it's a perfect little city. If you have never been to Durham, go there at once. Take my car. It's wonderful.”
Bill Bryson (born 1951) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Blackpool's illuminations are nothing if not splendid, and they are not splendid.”
Bill Bryson (born 1951) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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, and Mary Ellen was proof that even in the Appalachian woods I would not be spared. It became evident from the first moment that she was a rarity.”
Bill Bryson (born 1951) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If the mattress stains were anything to go by, a previous user had not so much suffered from incontinence as rejoiced in it. He had evidently included the pillow in his celebrations.”
Bill Bryson (born 1951) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In the Smokies, over 90 percent of Fraser firs—a noble tree, unique to the southern Appalachian highlands—are sick or dying, from a combination of acid rain and the depredations of a moth called the balsam woolly adelgid. Ask a park official what they are doing about it and he will say, “We are monitoring the situation closely.” For this, read: “We are watching them die.”
Bill Bryson (born 1951) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Let’s not lose our perspective here. The Smokies achieved their natural splendor without the guidance of a national park service and don’t actually need it now.”
Bill Bryson (born 1951) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Excuse me, but I just have to say this. You are more stupid than a paramecium.”
Bill Bryson (born 1951) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Virginia?” he said, as if I had asked him if there was anywhere local we could get a dose of syphilis.”
Bill Bryson (born 1951) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Now here’s a thought to consider. Every twenty minutes on the Appalachian Trail, Katz and I walked farther than the average American does in a week. For 93 percent of all trips outside the home, for whatever distance or whatever purpose, Americans now get in a car. On average the total walking of an American these days—that’s walking of all types: from car to office, from office to car, around the supermarket and shopping malls—adds up to 1.4 miles a week, barely 350 yards a day. That’s ridiculous.”
Bill Bryson (born 1951) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Now Stonewall Jackson is a man worth taking an interest in. Few people in history have achieved greater fame in a shorter period with less useful activity in the brainbox than Gen. Thomas J. Jackson. (long list of character deficiencies elided)... His ineradicable fame rests almost entirely on the fact that he had a couple of small but inspiring victories when elsewhere Southern troops were being slaughtered and routed and by dint of having the best nickname any soldier has ever enjoyed.”
Bill Bryson (born 1951) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Tell me, did they specify ’asshole’ on the job description, or did you take a course?”
Bill Bryson (born 1951) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The thing about the Army Corps of Engineers is that they don’t build things very well.”
Bill Bryson (born 1951) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“America was entering the age not just of the automobile but of the retarded attention span.”
Bill Bryson (born 1951) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“For a long time it puzzled me how something so expensive, so leading edge, could be so useless. And then it occurred to me that a computer is a stupid machine with the ability to do incredibly smart things, while computer programmers are smart people with the ability to do incredibly stupid things. They are, in short, a perfect match.”
Bill Bryson (born 1951) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“By almost universal agreement, the most vague and ineffectual of all [Presidents] was Millard Fillmore, who succeeded to the office in 1850 upon the death of Zachary Taylor, and spent the next three years demonstrating how the country would have been run if they had just propped Taylor up in a chair with cushions.”
Bill Bryson (born 1951) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“America is an outstandingly dangerous place. Consider this: every year in New Hampshire a dozen or more people are killed crashing their cars into moose. Now correct me if I am wrong, but this is not something that is likely to happen to you on the way home from Sainsbury's.”
Bill Bryson (born 1951) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Three things alone are certain when you venture into a loft: that you will crack your head on a beam at least twice, that you will get cobwebs draped over your face, and that you will not find what you went looking for.”
Bill Bryson (born 1951) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Normally, your wife can hear things that no one else on earth can hear. She can hear a dab of jam fall onto a carpet two rooms away. She can hear spilled coffee being furtively mopped up with a good bathtowel. She can hear dirt being tracked across a clean floor. She can hear you just thinking about doing something you shouldn't do. But get yourself stuck in a loft hatch and suddenly it is as if she has been placed in a soundproof chamber.”
Bill Bryson (born 1951) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“My wife [...] recently put me on a diet after suggesting (a little unkindly, if you ask me), that I was beginning to look like something Richard Branson would try to get airborne.”
Bill Bryson (born 1951) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[I relaxed] my customary aversion to consulting a book by anyone so immensely pratty as to put "Ph.D." after his name (I don't put Ph.D. after my name on my books, after all — and not just because I don't have one).”
Bill Bryson (born 1951) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There is always a little more toothpaste in the tube. Think about it.”
Bill Bryson (born 1951) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It would be a great abuse of my position to write that it was Northwest Airlines that treated us in this shoddy and inexcusable way, so I won't.”
Bill Bryson (born 1951) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Every dog on the face of the earth wants me dead.”
Bill Bryson (born 1951) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“After years of patient study (and with cricket there can be no other kind), I have decided that there is nothing wrong with the game that the introduction of golf carts wouldn't fix in a hurry.”
Bill Bryson (born 1951) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is not true that the English invented cricket as a way of making all other human endeavours look interesting and lively; that was merely an unintended side effect. I don't wish to denigrate a sport that is enjoyed by millions, some of them awake and facing the right way, but it is an odd game.”
Bill Bryson (born 1951) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Above all, what is oddest to the outsider is that Aborigines just aren't there.”
Bill Bryson (born 1951) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“So without an original or helpful thought in my head, I just sat for some minutes and watched these poor disconnected people shuffle past. Then I did what most white Australians do. I read my newspaper and drank my coffee and didn't see them anymore.”
Bill Bryson (born 1951) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It was impossible to determine what he was saying, but I imagined he was telling all those present that they were nongs and maggots. I decided I quite liked watching the news with the sound off.”
Bill Bryson (born 1951) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I'd turn on the lights, but they're blown. I'd offer you a seat, but there isn't one. I'd offer you a drink from the minibar, but there doesn't appear to be one." "It certainly is basic." "Basic? It's a bloody cell!”
Bill Bryson (born 1951) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I clearly re-call standing on in downtown Melbourne, so freshly arrived that I still smelled of (possibly even glistened from) the insecticide with which the flight attendants sprayed the plane before arrival, watching the clanging trams and swirl of humanity, and thinking, “Good Lord, there's a country here.”
Bill Bryson (born 1951) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There was a lot more joking going on when I was a kid. My dad, for instance, specialised in puns and I remember once we were on vacation in California and we were driving along the San Andreas Fault and he threw a quarter out of the window into the Fault because he said "he had always wanted to be generous to a fault".”
Bill Bryson (born 1951) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I really was more intent on getting out of Iowa than everybody else. I just felt I didn't quite fit in exactly, the way other people did. Then I came here and discovered by living in Britain that being a foreigner is really a treat. It is such a great position to be in. When things are going well you can step forward and take part in the ceremonies and everything is great. And when things are not going well, being entirely hypothetical here, if for example your national football team got beat by Germany, you can stand back and say what a shame.”
Bill Bryson (born 1951) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I had also got used to the idea that here [in the UK] you can make quips all the time and in America that can be very dangerous. I wrote about it in one of the books. Once I was going through customs and immigration in Boston, and the guy said as I went past "Any fruit or vegetables?" and I said "OK, I'll have four pounds of potatoes if they are fresh" and it was like he was going to take me off and pin me to the floor.”
Bill Bryson (born 1951) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“… I had some suggestions [about fencing]. I thought that you could encourage surprise attacks. I thought that would be very good. I kind of liked the idea of arming one guy with a conventional sword but giving the other a pikestaff. My favourite was the idea of blindfolding one of the competitors or blindfolding them both and spinning them around a bit so they were a little bit unstable and then just pushing them towards each other. It would make each match go on a bit longer.”
Bill Bryson (born 1951) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source