Quote

South Dakota... is like the world's first drive-through sensory deprivation chamber.

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
Chamber
Drive
South
Firsts
First
Like
Dakota
World
Deprivation
Sensory

More quotes by Bill Bryson

Image
Everywhere throughout New England you find old, tumbledown field walls, often in the middle of the deepest, most settled- looking woods- a reminder of just how swiftly nature reclaims the land in America.
Bill Bryson
Image
Even though sugar was very expensive, people consumed it till their teeth turned black, and if their teeth didn't turn black naturally, they blackened them artificially to show how wealthy and marvelously self-indulgent they were.
Bill Bryson
Image
Des Moines is like your typical American city it's just these concentric circles of malls, built outward from the city.
Bill Bryson
Image
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.
Bill Bryson
Image
The great failure in education, much of the time, is the lack of excitement and stimulus
Bill Bryson
Image
I'm not funny in person. I mean I'm really not. I'm one of those people who always screw up anecdotes.
Bill Bryson
Image
I come Des Moines. Somebody had to.
Bill Bryson
Image
Out of the thirty thousand types of edible plants thought to exist on Earth, just eleven—corn, rice, wheat, potatoes, cassava, sorghum, millet, beans, barley, rye, and oats—account for 93 percent of all that humans eat, and every one of them was first cultivated by our Neolithic ancestors.
Bill Bryson
Image
I wanted to quit and to do this forever, sleep in a bed and in a tent, see what was over the next hill and never see a hill again. All of this all at once, every moment, on the trail or off.
Bill Bryson
Image
I come from Des Moines. Someone had to.
Bill Bryson
Image
I turned to my own bunk and examined it with a kind of appalled fascination. 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.
Bill Bryson
Image
England was full of words I'd never heard before - streaky bacon, short back and sides, Belisha beacon, serviettes, high tea, ice-cream cornet.
Bill Bryson
Image
The upshot of all this is that we live in a universe whose age we can't quite compute, surrounded by stars whose distances we don't altogether know, filled with matter we can't identify, operating in conformance with physical laws whose properties we don’t truly understand.
Bill Bryson
Image
He had the sort of face that makes you realize God does have a sense of humor.
Bill Bryson
Image
Physics is really nothing more than a search for ultimate simplicity, but so far all we have is a kind of elegant messiness.
Bill Bryson
Image
I tell the kids that, even in a childhood marked by despair and deprivation, I knew that no matter what happened, I still had my family, or at least the remnants of a family ripped apart by divorce and then glued back together in various odd arrangements through a series of ill- advised remarriages. It was good to know I had a solid foundation.
Bill Bryson
Image
My first rule of consumerism is never to buy anything you can't make your children carry.
Bill Bryson
Image
You may not feel outstandingly robust, but if you are an average-sized adult you will contain within your modest frame no less than 7 X 10^18 joules of potential energy—enough to explode with the force of thirty very large hydrogen bombs, assuming you knew how to liberate it and really wished to make a point.
Bill Bryson
Image
Britain still has the most reliably beautiful countryside of anywhere in the world. I would hate to be part of the generation that allowed that to be lost.
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