803 Quotes by Bill Bryson

It is an interesting experience to become acquainted with a country through the eyes of the insane, and, if I may say so, a particularly useful grounding for life in Britain.

Des Moines is like your typical American city; it’s just these concentric circles of malls, built outward from the city.

The first book I did – the first successful book – was a kind of a travel book, and publishers in Britain encouraged me to do more.

Sometimes these differences in meaning take on a kind of bewildering circularity. A tramp in Britain is a bum in America, while a bum in Britain is a fanny in America, while a fanny in Britain is – well, we’ve covered that. To a foreigner it must seem sometimes as if we are being intentionally contrary.

Houses are really quite odd things. They have almost no universally defining qualities: they can be of practically any shape, incorporate virtually any material, be of almost any size. Yet wherever we go in the world we recognize domesticity the moment we see it.

Maine is wonderful. It can be very hard. I mean, if you look at the profile maps it doesn’t look it, but somehow when you get out there it’s really steep and hard.

For most of its history until fairly recent times the general pattern for Earth was to be hot with no permanent ice anywhere. The current ice age – ice epoch really – started about forty million years ago, and has ranged from murderously bad to not bad at all.

There are things you just can’t do in life. You can’t beat the phone company, you can’t make a waiter see you until he’s ready to see you, and you can’t go home again.

As my father always used to tell me, ‘You see, son, there’s always someone in the world worse off than you.’ And I always used to think, ‘So?