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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 0e0f90a | The Reverend Sydney Smith, though a man of the cloth, caught the spirit of the age by declining to say grace. 'With the ravenous orgasm upon you, it seems impertinent to interpose a religious sentiment,' he explained. 'It is a confusion of purpose to mutter out praises from a mouth that waters. | Bill Bryson | ||
| f8ff0e7 | England?" she said with unreserved amazement. "Why do you live in England?" "Because it is nothing like Indianapolis" | Bill Bryson | ||
| c7a6d72 | Is that dog shit on the bottom of your shoe?' I sat up a fraction. 'What?' 'Is that dog shit on the bottom of your shoe?' 'I don't know, the lab report's not back yet,' I replied drily. 'I'm serious, is that dog shit?' 'How should I know?' Katz leaned far enough forward to give it a good look and a cautious sniff. 'It dog shit,' he announced with an odd tone of satisfaction. 'Well, keep quiet about it or everybody'll want some.' 'Go and c.. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 7e98873 | Physicists are notoriously scornful of scientists from other fields. When the great Austrian physicist Wolfgang Pauli's wife left him for a chemist, he was staggered with disbelief. 'Had she taken a bullfighter13 I would have understood,' he remarked in wonder to a friend. 'But a chemist ... | Bill Bryson | ||
| c3c4516 | While working at a sawmill, he slipped and fell against the whirring blade, which tore through his upper body at the shoulder, creating a hole so large that his internal organs were exposed--one witness claimed he could see the poor man's beating heart--and leaving his arm attached by just a few strands of glistening sinew. The millworkers bound the injuries as best they could and carried Lindbergh home, where he lay in silent agony for thr.. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 4703329 | Of course, you'll have to fly to the refugee camp at Dadaab," Will observed thoughtfully at one point. He glanced at me. "To avoid the bandits," he explained. Dan and Nick nodded gravely. "I beg your pardon?" I said, taking a sudden interest. "It's bandit country all round there," Will said. "Where?" I asked, peering at the map for the first time. "Oh, just there," Will said, waving a hand vaguely across most of east Africa. "But you'll be.. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 6c7ace9 | It was so bad, it was worth more than we paid. | tourist-trap | Bill Bryson | |
| d483c0b | Jesus, I smell like Jeffrey Dahmer's refrigerator. | Bill Bryson | ||
| bec21ef | To be fair, English is full of booby traps for the unwary foreigner. Any language where the unassuming word fly signifies an annoying insect, a means of travel, and a critical part of a gentleman's apparel is clearly asking to be mangled. | Bill Bryson | ||
| e18e79c | So what is your star sign?' Said Mary Ellen 'Cunnilingus' Katz answered looking profoundly unhappy. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 52441be | How do migrating birds know which one to follow? What if the lead bird just wants to be alone? | Bill Bryson | ||
| 8956acf | It sometimes occurs to me that the British have more heritage than is good for them. In a country where there is so astonishingly much of everything, it is easy to look on it as a kind of inexhaustible resource. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 11916e7 | I often use alcohol as an artificial check on my skills. | false-humility | Bill Bryson | |
| b6bac28 | When Daniel Boone is uneasy, you know it's time to watch your step. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 0f078d1 | It is an intoxicating experience to taste Coca-Cola as if for the first time and to be conveyed to the very brink of orgasm by white bread. Makes all the discomfort worthwhile, if you ask me. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 5b03ad3 | Imagine having a city full of things that no other city had. | urban-sprawl cities urban-life | Bill Bryson | |
| 0c32190 | The National Park Service actually has something of a tradition of making things extinct. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 6a486a2 | Pennsylvania one year paid out $90,000 in bounties for the killing of 130,000 owls and hawks to save the state's farmers a slightly less than whopping $1,875 in estimated livestock losses. (It is not very often, after all, that an owl carries off a cow.) | Bill Bryson | ||
| 3894b2a | The fact is that the British have a totally private sense of distance. This is most visibly seen in the shared pretense that Britain is a lonely island in the middle of an empty green sea. Of course, the British are all aware, in an abstract sort of way, that there is a substantial landmass called Europe nearby and that from time to time it is necessary to go over there to give old Jerry a drubbing or have a holiday in the sun, but it's not.. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 6c83008 | There is a phenomenon called Trail Magic, known and spoken of with reverence by everyone who hikes the trail, which holds that often when things look darkest some little piece of serendipity comes along to put you back on a heavenly plane. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 7933d87 | we all recognize a likeness of Shakespeare the instant we see one, and yet we don't really know what he looked like. It is like this with nearly every aspect of his life and character: He is at once the best known and least known of figures. | shakespeare | Bill Bryson | |
| 7bb3ad4 | Rome was as wonderful as I had hoped it would be, certainly a step up from Peoria. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 2c00cf6 | Oh, go on' you prod encouragingly. 'Well, just a small one then,' they say and dartingly take a small one, and then get a look as if they have just done something terribly devilish. All this is completely alien to the American mind. To an American the whole purpose of living, the one constant confirmation of continued existence, is to cram as much sensual pleasure as possible into one's mouth more or less continuously. Gratification, instan.. | Bill Bryson | ||
| af38264 | We clambered for hours up vast, perpendicular slopes, over clattering scree and lumpy tussocks, round towering citadels of rock, and emerged at length into a cold, bleak, lofty nether world so remote and forbidding that even the sheep were startled to see us. | Bill Bryson | ||
| a9dcf9b | Describing his experience with the sting of an extremely toxic jellyfish, he did something you don't often see a scientist do: he shivered. | emotion testimony perspective vulnerability sin | Bill Bryson | |
| c9c7e3c | The way I see it, there are three reasons never to be unhappy. First, you were born. This in itself is a remarkable achievement. | Bill Bryson | ||
| e583e06 | It had to be the greatest irony in the history of mankind, he thought. The last Christian in the entire universe was a machine. | David Weber | ||
| 651e422 | Extremists tend to grow more extreme, not less, as problems get closer to solutions, | David Weber | ||
| 1e99fbb | Good weather will do this to people, bond them in their gratefulness. | Elizabeth Berg | ||
| 834b839 | My love, why did you leave me on Lexington Avenue in the Ford that had no brakes? It stalled in the traffic and broke down outside her window. She was writing a letter: I love you very much: Careful Now in capitals. That was a different letter. Yes, but I get confused. One day she saw a golden oriel in the orchard. One day she said, Then have your orgy with Blondie, work out your passion on her. I see it all, the poop of burnished gold. If .. | Elizabeth Smart | ||
| e4cbb5a | as dark as the night gets without a moon, it is really not true darkness. It's just waiting for light to return. | Elizabeth Haydon | ||
| 14c4861 | I do not think God makes bad things happen just so that people can grow spiritually. Bad parents do that. Bad parents make things hard and painful for their children and then say it was to help them grow. Growing and living are hard enough already; children do not need things to be harder. | Elizabeth Moon | ||
| e2fc96f | I am so often struck by what we do not do, all of us. And I am also, now, so acutely aware of the quick passage of time, the way that we come suddenly to our own separate closures. It is as though a thing says, I told you. But you thought I was just kidding. | Elizabeth Berg | ||
| bcd4d65 | Miss Sevier in high school told us the police think we have knives or guns in our pockets and that they have killed people who were just trying to get out their IDs. I think that is wrong, but I read where the court decided it was all right if the police were really scared. Yet if anybody else is really scared of the police it's not all right for the scared person to kill a policeman. | Elizabeth Moon | ||
| bfc26dc | If the retreat house was a trap, it was a very nice one. | Elizabeth Hand | ||
| 45ec6f5 | Having to struggle gave me the chance to demonstrate strength of character. | Elizabeth Moon | ||
| 5d35809 | I think the nicest thing about days is their unexpectedness. It's jolly to wake up like this on a golden-fine morning and day-dream for ten minutes before I get up, imagining heaps of splendid things that might happen. | L.M. Montgomery | ||
| 59c4de3 | Cakes have such a terrible habit of turning out bad just when you especially want them to be good - Anne Shirley | L.M. Montgomery | ||
| 2dc8643 | What if you never meet him? Then I shall die an old maid, was the cheerful response. I daresay it isn't the hardest death by any means. Oh, I suppose the dying would be easy enough, it's the living an old maid I shouldn't like, said Diana, with no intention of being humorous. | l.m. Montgomery | ||
| 99bc31d | we lost our son, Anne, as did many others, but we have our memories of him and souls cannot die. We can still walk with Walter in the spring. | L.M. Montgomery | ||
| 4a6c2e8 | You could not fence with an antagonist who met rapier thrust with blow of battle axe. | debate | L.M. Montgomery | |
| 7b91424 | Fancies are like shadows . . . you can't cage them, they're such wayward, dancing things. | L.M. Montgomery | ||
| db8e269 | I can always get through to-day very nicely. It's to-morrow I can't live through | L.M. Montgomery | ||
| 99d7156 | His face just looks like one of those long, narrow stones in the graveyard, doesn't it? 'Sacred to the memory' ought to be written on his forehead. | L.M. Montgomery |