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Book: Neither Here, Nor There: Travels in Europe
Quotes of Book: Neither Here, Nor There:
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  1. Bill Bryson _ Neither Here, Nor There:

    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.
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  2. Bill Bryson _ Neither Here, Nor There:

    I had a hangover you could sell to science,
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  3. Bill Bryson _ Neither Here, Nor There:

    I hate asking directions. I am always afraid that the person I approach will step back and say, 'You want to go where? The centre of Brussels? Boy, are you lost. This is Lille, you dumb shit,' then stop other passers-by and say, 'You wanna hear something classic? Buddy, tell these people where you think you are,' and that I'll have to push my way through a crowd of people who are falling about and wiping tears of mirth from their eyes. So I trudged on.
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  4. Bill Bryson _ Neither Here, Nor There:

    It fascinated me that Europeans could at once be so alike – that they could be so universally bookish and cerebral, and drive small cars, and live in little houses in ancient towns, and love soccer, and be relatively unmaterialistic and law-abiding, and have chilly hotel rooms and cosy and inviting places to eat and drink – and yet be so endlessly, unpredictably different from each other as well. I loved the idea that you could never be sure of anything in Europe.
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  5. Bill Bryson _ Neither Here, Nor There:

    Coming from a country where no one seemed to think it particularly disgraceful that a child with a brain tumour could be sent home to die because his father didn't have the wherewithal to pay a surgeon, or where an insurance company could be permitted by a state insurance commissioner to cancel the policies of its 14,000 sickest patients because it wasn't having a very good year {as happened in California in 1989}, it seemed to me admirable beyond words that a nation could dedicate itself to providing equally and fairly for everyone, whatever the cost.
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  6. Bill Bryson _ Neither Here, Nor There:

    In Florence, the annual ratio of tourists to locals is 14:1. How can any place preserve any kind of independent life when it is so manifestly overwhelmed? It can't. It's as simple as that.
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  7. Bill Bryson _ Neither Here, Nor There:

    Incorporated into many of the façades are parts of the original structure – stairways that go nowhere, columns supporting nothing, niches that once clearly held Roman busts. The effect is that the houses look as if they grew magically out of the ruins. It is entrancing and there is no other place in Europe like it.
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  8. Bill Bryson _ Neither Here, Nor There:

    Eventually we crossed a plank over a narrow ditch, made our way across a grassless yard and entered a four-storey building that looked only half-finished. A cement mixer was standing by the stairwell. I was beginning to have my doubts. This was just the place for an ambush.
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  9. Bill Bryson _ Neither Here, Nor There:

    Isn't it strange how wealth is always wasted on the rich?
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  10. Bill Bryson _ Neither Here, Nor There:

    If you can imagine a man having a vasectomy without anaesthetic to a background accompaniment of frantic sitar-playing, you will have some idea of what popular Turkish music is like."
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  11. Bill Bryson _ Neither Here, Nor There:

    It was a haven, a little island of light in the darkness of the downtown, very like the diner in Edward Hopper's painting 'The Nighthawks'.
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  12. Bill Bryson _ Neither Here, Nor There:

    I was about to say it was an awful place, but in fact, like most things connected with one's adolescence, it was wonderful and awful at the same time."
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