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Book: A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail
Quotes of Book: A Walk in the Woods:
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  1. Bill Bryson _ A Walk in the Woods:

    Distance changes utterly when you take the world on foot. A mile becomes a long way, two miles literally considerable, ten miles whopping, fifty miles at the very limits of conception.
    book-quotewalking

  2. Bill Bryson _ A Walk in the Woods:

    Good lord, look at you!" he cried, delighted at my grubbiness. "What have you been doing? You're filthy!" He looked me up and down admiringly, then said in a more solemn tone: "You haven't been screwing hogs again, have you, Bryson?""Ha ha ha.""They're not clean animals, you know, no matter how attractive they may look after a month on the trail. And don't forget we're not in Tennessee anymore. It's probably not even legal here - at least not without a note from the vet." He patted the chair beside him, beaming all over, happy with his quips. "Come and sit down and tell me all about it. So what was her name - Bossy?" He leaned closely and confidentially. "Did she squeal a lot?
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  3. Bill Bryson _ A Walk in the Woods:

    So woods are spooky. Quite apart from the thought that they may harbor wild beasts and armed, genetically challenged fellows named Zeke and Festus, there is something innately sinister about them, some ineffable thing that makes you sense an atmosphere of pregnant doom with every step and leaves you profoundly aware that you are out of your element and ought to keep your ears pricked. Though you tell yourself it's preposterous, you can't quite shake the feeling that you are being watched. You order yourself to be serene {it's just a woods for goodness sake}, but really you are jumpier than Don Knotts with pistol drawn.
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  4. Bill Bryson _ A Walk in the Woods:

    A full moon rose in the pale evening sky and glowed with a rich white inner light that brought to mind, but perfectly, the creamy inside of an Oreo cookie. {Eventually on the trail everything reminds you of food.}
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  5. Bill Bryson _ A Walk in the Woods:

    Though you tell yourself it's preposterous, you can't quite shake the feeling that you are being watched. You order yourself to be serene {it's just a woods for goodness sake}, but really you are jumpier than Don Knotts with pistol drawn.
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  6. Bill Bryson _ A Walk in the Woods:

    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.
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  7. Bill Bryson _ A Walk in the Woods:

    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."
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  8. Bill Bryson _ A Walk in the Woods:

    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 to stroke it or feed it a cupcake or something. There is one recorded instance of a woman smearing honey on her toddler's fingers so that the bear would lick it off for the video camera. Failing to understand this, the bear ate the baby's hand.
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  9. Bill Bryson _ A Walk in the Woods:

    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.
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  10. Bill Bryson _ A Walk in the Woods:

    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, scandalized. "Actually I think she called you pussies." "She called us pussies?" Katz said. "Now I will kill her.
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  11. Bill Bryson _ A Walk in the Woods:

    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 hiked the Appalachian Trail. I hiked it in snow and I hiked it in heat. I hikedit in the South and I hiked in the North. I hiked it till my feet bled. I hiked the Appalachian Trail, Bryson.""We missed out a lot of it, you know.""Details," Katz sniffed.
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  12. Bill Bryson _ A Walk in the Woods:

    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.
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