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What is it about maps? I could look at them all day, earnestly studying the names of towns and villages I have never heard of and will never visit.

Bill Bryson

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Bill Bryson
Age: 72
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
Never
Village
Towns
Travel
Study
Earnestly
Heard
Villages
Names
Studying
Look
Visit
Looks
Maps

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I love everything about motels. I can't help myself. I still get excited every time I slip a key into a motel room door and fling it open.
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From an evolutionary point of view, sex is really just a reward mechanism to encourage us to pass on our genetic material.
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The number of people on whose cooperative efforts your eventual existence depends has risen to approximately 1,000,000,000,000,000,000, which is several thousand times the total number of people who have ever lived.
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Physicists are atoms' way of thinking about atoms.
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Still, I never really mind bad service in a restaurant. It makes me feel better about not leaving a tip.
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You can always tell a Midwestern couple in Europe because they will be standing on a traffic island in the middle of a busy intersection looking at a windblown map and arguing over which way is west. European cities, with their wandering streets and undisciplined alleys, drive Midwesterners practically insane.
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There is more difference between a zebra and a horse, or between a dolphin and a porpoise, than there is between you and the furry creatures your distant ancestors left behind when they set out to take over the world.
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Consider the Lichen. Lichens are just about the hardiest visible organisms on Earth, but the least ambitious.
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It was an odd situation. For a century and a half, men got rid of their own hair, which was perfectly comfortable, and instead covered their heads with something foreign and uncomfortable. Very often it was actually their own hair made into a wig. People who couldn't afford wigs tried to make their hair look like a wig.
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I see litter as part of a long continuum of anti-social behaviour.
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All the things that are part of your heritage make you British - that makes this country what it is. It's part of your history. And here, unlike America, it's still living history.
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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.
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We used to build civilizations. Now we build shopping malls.
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The great failure in education, much of the time, is the lack of excitement and stimulus
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I love the feeling of being anonymous in a city I've never been before.
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The universe is not only queerer than we suppose it is queerer than we can suppose
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Cheapness is a great virtue.
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The tearoom lady called me love. All the shop ladies called me love and most of the men called me mate. I hadn't been here twelve hours and already they loved me.
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Black bears rarely attack. But here's the thing. Sometimes they do. All bears are agile, cunning and immensely strong, and they are always hungry. If they want to kill you and eat you, they can, and pretty much whenever they want. That doesn't happen often, but - and here is the absolutely salient point - once would be enough.
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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.
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