Bill Bryson Quotes
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I wish I could adjust my voice, but it's just what's happened to me. It's because I've lived abroad for a long time, and my wife is English and my kids all have English accents, and every voice I hear is English. I've never intentionally changed my accent at all.
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In 1927, if you were stuck with idle time, reading is what you did. It's no accident that the 'Book-of-the-Month Club' and 'The Literary Guild' were founded in that period as well as a lot of magazines, like 'Reader's Digest,' 'Time,' and 'The New Yorker.'
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I would make a genuinely terrible guide. I can't remember things. I would get half way through telling a story or explaining something and I would get distracted. Oh, and I have absolutely no sense of direction at all.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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'Virginia?' he said, as if I had asked him if there was anywhere local we could get a dose of syphilis.
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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.
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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.
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I want things to be better all the time. And I tend to get angry about that. Books are an opportunity to vent.
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I've been writing all these books that have been largely autobiographical and yet, really, they don't tell you anything about me. I just use my life story as a kind of device on which to hang comic observations. It's not my interest or instinct to tell the world anything pertinent about myself or my family.
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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.
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The world is very lucky to have America. It's got to be the first time in the whole history of the planet that a country has been the dominant force in the world and it has actually been a force for good... America really deserves more credit.
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It is a slightly arresting notion that if you were to pick yourself apart with tweezers, one atom at a time, you would produce a mound of fine atomic dust, none of which had ever been alive but all of which had once been you.
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More than 300 million people in the world speak English and the rest, it sometimes seems, try to.
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It is natural human impulse to think of evolution as a long chain of improvements, of a never-ending advance towards largeness and complexity - in a word, towards us. We flatter ourselves. Most of the real diversity in evolution has been small-scale. We large things are just flukes - an interesting side branch.
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You may find that your parents are the most delightful people, but you don't want to live with them.
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I just use my life story as a kind of device on which to hang comic observations. It's not my interest or instinct to tell the world anything pertinent about myself or my family.
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But what is life to a lichen? Yet its impulse to exist, to be, is every bit as strong as ours - arguably even stronger. If I were told that I had to spend decades being a furry growth on a rock in the woods, I believe I would lose the will to go on.
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Nearly a quarter of American men were in the Armed forces in 1968. The rest were in school, in prison, or were George W. Bush.
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I hadn't realized quite how extraordinary Charles Lindbergh's achievement was in flying the Atlantic alone. He had never flown over open water before, but he flew straight to Dingle Bay in Ireland and then on to Paris, exactly as planned.
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I don't know whether I'm misanthropic. It seems to me I'm constantly disappointed. I'm very easily disappointed. Disappointed in the things that people do; disappointed in the things that people construct. I want things to be better all the time.
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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. And a really good story because he was this kid who grew up essentially as an orphan, you know, had a tough life, and then he became the most successful baseball player ever. But he was also a really good guy.
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I see litter as part of a long continuum of anti-social behaviour.