Bill Bryson Quotes

The Smokies seem to be in the process of losing most of their mussels. The National Park Service actually has something of a tradition of making things extinct. Bryce Canyon National Park is perhaps the most interesting—certainly the most striking—example. It was founded in 1923 and in less than half a century under the Park Service’s stewardship lost seven species of mammal—the white-tailed jackrabbit, prairie dog, pronghorn antelope, flying squirrel, beaver, red fox, and spotted skunk. Quite an achievement when you consider that these animals had survived in Bryce Canyon for tens of millions of years before the Park Service took an interest in them. Altogether, forty-two species of mammal have disappeared from America’s national parks this century.

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.

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.

I know this goes without saying, but Stonehenge really was the most incredible accomplishment. It took five hundred men just to pull each sarsen, plus a hundred more to dash around positioning the rollers. Just think about it for a minute. Can you imagine trying to talk six hundred people into helping you drag a fifty-ton stone eighteen miles across the countryside and muscle it into an upright position, and then saying, "Right, lads! Another twenty like that, plus some lintels and maybe a couple of dozen nice bluestones from Wales, and we can party!" Whoever was the person behind Stonehenge was one dickens of a motivator, I'll tell you that.

Blackpool's illuminations are nothing if not splendid, and they are not splendid.

Why, it's a perfect little city. If you have never been to Durham, go there at once. Take my car. It's wonderful.

We couldn't place their accents but we thought the smaller one might be Australian since he seemed so at home down under.

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.

Bryson. You’ve got three kinds of chromosomes: X, Y and fuck-head. - Katz

The best that can be said for Norwegian television is that it gives you the sensation of a coma without the worry and inconvenience.

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.

For forty years or so this was the world headquarters of conspicuous consumption.

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.

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?)

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.