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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 9da2d31 | As humans we are inclined to feel that life must have a point. We have plans and aspirations and desires. We want to take constant advantage of all the intoxicating existence we've been endowed with. But what's life to a cell? Yet it's impulse to exist, to be, is every bit as strong as ours - perhaps even stronger. Life just wants to be. | desires existence history humans impulse life | Bill Bryson | |
| f8acf6d | I have been told more than once in fact that one of the more trying things about learning to live with the Germans after the war was having to watch them return with their wives and girlfriends to show off the places they had helped to ruin. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 2f00c5a | 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 lifted it and sniffed it, then wished I hadn't. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 9b0c89a | IT WASN'T THAT MY MOTHER AND FATHER were indifferent to their children's physical well-being by any means. It was just that they seemed to believe that everything would be fine in the end and they were always right. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 65ae17b | Anyway, we did it," Katz said at last, looking up. He noted my quizzical expression. "Hiked Maine, I mean." I looked at him. "Stephen, we didn't even see Mount Katahdin." He dismissed this as a petty quibble. "Another mountain," he said. "How many do you need to see, Bryson?" I snorted a small laugh. "Well, that's one way of looking at it." "It's the only way of looking at it," Katz went on and quite earnestly. "As far as I'm concerned, I h.. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 751f21b | In January of that year, according to a report written in America by a Times reporter, scientists were seriously investigating the possibility that a mysterious seismic disturbance in the remote Australian outback almost four years earlier had been a nuclear explosion set off by members of the Japanese doomsday cult Aum Shinrikyo. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 43355c0 | This is comfortable and clean and familiar. Apart from a tendency among men of a certain age to wear knee-high socks with shorts, these people are just like you and me. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 0e5572d | So you must be the guys she was talking about." "Really?" Katz said. "What'd she say?" "Oh, nothing," he said, but he was suppressing a small smile in that way that makes you say: "What?" "Nothing. It was nothing." But he was smiling. "What?" He wavered. "Oh, all right. She said you guys were a couple of overweight wimps who didn't know the first thing about hiking and that she was tired of carrying you." "She said that?" Katz said, scandal.. | Bill Bryson | ||
| b4d9aa6 | This is something that has been puzzling me for years. Women will stand there watching their items being rung up, and then when the till lady says, 'That's PS4.20, love,' or whatever, they suddenly look as if they've never done this sort of thing before. They go 'Oh!' and start rooting in a flustered fashion in their handbag for their purse or chequebook, as if no-one had told them that this might happen. | Bill Bryson | ||
| b69223b | For 2 billion years this is all the life there was on earth, but in that time the stromatolites raised the oxygen level in the atmosphere to 20 percent--enough to allow the development of other, more complex life-forms: me, for instance. My gratitude was real. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 8f39fdd | Pilchard begins his long run in from short stump. He bowls and ... oh, he's out! Yes, he's got him. Longwilley is caught leg-before in middle slops by Grattan. Well, now what do you make of that, Neville?' 'That's definitely one for the books, Bruce. I don't think I've seen offside medium slow fast pace bowling to match it since Baden-Powell took Rangachangabanga for a maiden ovary at Bangalore in 1948.' I had stumbled into the surreal and .. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 8108c8e | Soon levees up and down the river were popping like buttons off a tight shirt. At Mounds Landing, Mississippi, a hundred black workers, kept at their posts by men with rifles, were swept to oblivion when a levee gave way. The coroner, for reasons unstated, recorded just two deaths. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 0d019b2 | Don't ever do anything on principle alone. If you haven't got a better reason for doing something other than the principle of the thing, then don't do it. | Bill Bryson | ||
| ca69dc3 | Take it from me, if you are in an open space with no weapons and a grizzly comes for you, run. You may as well. If nothing else, it will give you something to do with the last seven seconds of your life. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 50e4ea9 | The thing about Ayers Rock is that by the time you finally get there you are already a little sick of it. | ayers-rock travel | Bill Bryson | |
| 447ce94 | You are totally at the mercy of nature in this country, mate. It's just a fact of life. | mother-nature survival | Bill Bryson | |
| d40e725 | Indeed, to them people are overweight creatures in baseball caps who spread lots and lots of food out on picnic tables and then shriek a little and waddle off to get their video cameras when old Mr. Bear comes along and climbs onto the table and starts devouring their potato salad and chocolate cake. Since the bear doesn't mind being filmed and indeed seems indifferent to his audience, pretty generally some fool will come up to it and try t.. | Bill Bryson | ||
| bd96198 | An Australian fly will try to suck the moisture off your eyeball. He will, if not constantly turned back, go into parts of your ears that a Q-tip can only dream about. He will happily die for the glory of taking a tiny dump on your tongue. Get thirty or forty of them dancing around you in the same way and madness will shortly follow. And | Bill Bryson | ||
| 1ba7c02 | You have no engagements, commitments, obligations, or duties; no special ambitions and only the smallest, least complicated of wants; you exist in a tranquil tedium, serenely beyond the reach of exasperation, "far removed from the seats of strife," as the early explorer and botanist William Bartram put it. All that is required of you is a willingness to trudge." -- | Bill Bryson | ||
| 2948f48 | They climbed back into the dish with brooms and scrubbing brushes and carefully swept it clean of what they referred to in a later paper as "white dielectric material," or what is known more commonly as bird shit." | Bill Bryson | ||
| f56dc08 | Among the words first found in Shakespeare are abstemious, antipathy, critical, frugal, dwindle, extract, horrid, vast, hereditary, critical, excellent, eventful, barefaced, assassination, lonely, leapfrog, indistinguishable, well-read, zany, and countless others (including countless). | Bill Bryson | ||
| d3342cd | Hunters will tell you that a moose is a wily and ferocious forest creature. Nonsense. A moose is a cow drawn by a three-year-old. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 39fd06a | Yet Malone, remarkably, was a model of restraint compared with others, such as John Payne Collier, who was also a scholar of great gifts, but grew so frustrated at the difficulty of finding physical evidence concerning Shakespeare's life that he began to create his own, forging documents to bolster his arguments if not, ultimately, his reputation. He was eventually exposed when the keeper of mineralogy at the British Museum proved with a se.. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 16535cb | There is something about the pace and scale of British life - an appreciation of small pleasures, a kind of restraint with respect to greed, generally speaking - that makes life strangely agreeable. The British really are the only people in the world who become genuinely enlivened when presented with a hot beverage and a small plain biscuit. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 9e3da3f | Fail not in this charge at your peril. | David Weber | ||
| 6dfb8eb | I am an officer of the Royal Manticoran Navy, Sir--" Venizelos felt an undeniable rush of adrenaline and pleasure as he faced the burly captain squarely "--and the Royal Manticoran Navy does not 'bluff." | David Weber | ||
| bbfe5a2 | All things considered, Her Grace's plan may not have been the single rashest, most foolhardy, do-or-die, all-or-nothing throw of the dice in the history of the Royal Manticoran -- or Grayson -- Navy. If it wasn't, however, I have so far failed to find the plan that . | David Weber | ||
| 8cd4175 | She really should be careful about imputing sordid motives to the First Lord. Not because she doubted that he had them, but because not even Sir Edward Janacek could have only sordid motivations. That would have completely devalued his ability to do such things out of simple stupidity, instead of calculation. | David Weber | ||
| 3a3df69 | If one of her officers needed reprimanding, she would attend to it in private, just as she made it a point to deliver praise in public. | David Weber | ||
| 87f2996 | McKeon: "You know Hauptman is going to deny they had anything to do with it [smuggling]." "Forty-three million in illegal peltries? Of course they will, just as 's captain insists the space fairies must have brought them," Honor said ironically." | David Weber | ||
| 94f2c1f | They could hate her guts all they liked as long as they did their duty. | David Weber | ||
| ad04eea | Whatever it took, she would discharge her own duties and meet her own responsibilities. Not just to protect her career, but because they were her duties and responsibilities. | David Weber | ||
| af78c57 | The list went on and on, and there'd been a time when she'd craved those medals, those confirmations of achievement and ability. She was proud of them even now, but they were no longer the stuff of dreams. She'd learned too much about what those bits of ribbon cost. | David Weber | ||
| 52b3945 | Mother's casting hungry looks at my exec again," she complained. "Not to worry," her father replied. "She looks a lot, but she's never had any reason to roam." "You're as bad as she is!" | David Weber | ||
| 5e07d38 | the one certain thing in life is that no one can make the truth untrue simply because it hurts. | inspirational-quotes morality philosophy true truth | David Weber | |
| c17dc06 | They never saw the other side of the coin, the responsibility to keep going because your people needed you to and the agony of knowing misjudgment or carelessness could kill far more than just yourself. Or the infinitely worse agony of sentencing your own people to die because you had no choice. Because it was their duty to risk their lives, and it was yours to take them into death's teeth with you . . . or send them on ahead. | David Weber | ||
| a09d18a | Dying gloriously sounds good in bad historical novels. Speaking for myself, I think doing it in real life when you don't have to is fucking stupid, and it irritates the hell out of me that we don't appear to have any choice. | David Weber | ||
| 012a6c2 | All right, Chief Killian." She allowed herself an airy gesture at the forward visual display. "That away--full military power." | David Weber | ||
| 241ee90 | before them: the girls whose hearts were to be wrung were yet fair little maidens a-star with hopes and dreams. | L.M. Montgomery | ||
| 3c4b4ac | Well, hope for your thrilling career - but remember that if there is to be drama in your life somebody must pay the piper in the coin of suffering. If not you - then someone else. | interesting-life melodrama suffering | L.M. Montgomery | |
| 6ca885a | Nothing is ever really lost to us as long as we remember it." -- L.M. Montgomery, The Story Girl ~Jethro~" -- | Penny Reid | ||
| 7dbdb3c | Nobody is ever too old to dream. And dreams never grow old. | L.M. Montgomery | ||
| 855d12e | Don't give up all your romance Anne, a little of it is a good thing - not too much of course-but keep a little of it - Matthew Cuthbert | L.M. Montgomery | ||
| 1483b92 | God is in His heaven. All is right in the world. | L.M. Montgomery |