Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Bill Bryson
Age: 73
Born: 1951
Born: December 8
Author
Autobiographer
Journalist
Science Communicator
Science Writer
Travel Writer
Writer
Des Moines
Iowa
William Bryson
William Bill McGuire Bryson
William McGuire Bryson
Worse
Lead
Question
Mused
Full
Enchanted
Moments
Stimulus
Life
Bored
Easily
Boring

More quotes by Bill Bryson

Image
South Dakota... is like the world's first drive-through sensory deprivation chamber.
Bill Bryson
Image
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
Image
A cough so robust that I tapped into two new seams of phlegm.
Bill Bryson
Image
In my day, the principal concerns of university students were sex, smoking dope, rioting and learning. Learning was something you did only when the first three weren't available.
Bill Bryson
Image
Language is more fashion than science, and matters of usage, spelling and pronunciation tend to wander around like hemlines.
Bill Bryson
Image
Hardly anyone ever leaves. This is because Des Moines is the most powerful hypnotic known to man. Outside town there is a big sign that says, WELCOME TO DES MOINES. THIS IS WHAT DEATH IS LIKE. There isn't really. I just made that up. But the place does get a grip on you.
Bill Bryson
Image
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.
Bill Bryson
Image
Everything seems to be designed for the benefit of the automobile and not the benefit of the human being.
Bill Bryson
Image
For anyone of a rational disposition, fashion is often nearly impossible to fathom. Throughout many periods of history – perhaps most – it can seem as if the whole impulse of fashion has been to look maximally ridiculous. If one could be maximally uncomfortable as well, the triumph was all the greater.
Bill Bryson
Image
I can wear a baseball cap I am entitled to wear a baseball cap. I am genetically pre-disposed to wear a baseball cap, whereas most English people look wrong in a baseball cap.
Bill Bryson
Image
I come Des Moines. Somebody had to.
Bill Bryson
Image
Making English grammar conform to Latin rules is like asking people to play baseball using the rules of football.
Bill Bryson
Image
Those who sniff decay in every shift of sense or alteration of usage do the language no service. Too often for such people the notion of good English has less to do with expressing ideas clearly than with making words conform to some arbitrary pattern.
Bill Bryson
Image
Taxonomy is described sometimes as a science and sometimes as an art, but really it’s a battleground.
Bill Bryson
Image
Eating in Sweden is really just a series of heartbreaks.
Bill Bryson
Image
In France, a chemist named Pilatre de Rozier tested the flammability of hydrogen by gulping a mouthful and blowing across an open flame, proving at a stroke that hydrogen is indeed explosively combustible and that eyebrows are not necessarily a permanent feature of one's face.
Bill Bryson
Image
To an American the whole purpose of living, the one constant confirmation of continued existence, is to cram as much as sensual pleasure as possible into one's mouth more or less continuously. Gratification, instant and lavish, is a birthright
Bill Bryson
Image
Coming back to your native land after an absence of many years is a surprisingly unsettling business, a little like waking from a long coma. Time, you discover, has wrought changes that leave you feeling mildly foolish and out of touch.
Bill Bryson
Image
I became quietly seized with that nostalgia that overcomes you when you have reached the middle of your life and your father has recently died and it dawns on you that when he went he took some of you with him.
Bill Bryson
Image
It is unthinkable to have a British countryside that doesn't have actual functioning farmers riding tractors, cows in fields, things like that.
Bill Bryson