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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:

    began to feel that queasy guilt that you can only know if you have lived among the English-a terrible suspicion that any pleasure involving more than a cup of milky tea and a chocolate digestive biscuit is somehow irreligiously excessive.
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  2. Bill Bryson _ Neither Here Nor There:

    To my mind, the only possible pet is a cow. Cows love you. They are harmless, they look nice, they don't need a box to crap in, they keep the grass down, and they are so trusting and stupid that you can't help but lose your heart to them. Where I live in Yorkshire, there's a herd of cows down the lane. You can stand by the wall at any hour of the day or night, and after a minute the cows will all waddle over and stand with you, much too stupid to know what to do next, but happy just to be with you. They will stand there all day, as far as I can tell, possibly till the end of time. They will listen to your problems and never ask a thing in return. They will be your friends forever. And when you get tired of them, you can kill them and eat them. Perfect. Durbuy
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  3. Bill Bryson _ Neither Here Nor There:

    I soon learned that everyone in Paris was like that. You would go into a bakery and be greeted by some vast sluglike creature with a look that told you you would never be friends. In halting French you would ask for a small loaf of bread. The woman would give you a long, cold stare and then put a dead beaver on the counter. "No, no," you would say, hands aflutter, "not a dead beaver. A loaf of bread." The sluglike creature would stare at you in patent disbelief, then turn to the other customers and address them in French at much too high a speed for you to follow, but the drift of which clearly was that this person here, this American tourist, had come in and asked for a dead beaver and she had given him a dead beaver and now he was saying that he didn't want a dead beaver at all, he wanted a loaf of bread. The other customers would look at you as if you had just tried to fart in their handbags, and you would have no choice but to slink away and console yourself with the thought that in another four days you would be in Brussels and probably able to eat again.
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  4. Bill Bryson _ Neither Here Nor There:

    I can't think of anything that excites a greater sense of childlike wonder than to be in a country where you are ignorant of almost everything. Suddenly you are five years old again. You can't read anything, you have only the most rudimentary sense of how things work, you can't even reliably cross a street without endangering your life. Your whole existence becomes a series of interesting guesses.
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  5. Bill Bryson _ Neither Here Nor There:

    Rome was as wonderful as I had hoped it would be, certainly a step up from Peoria.
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  6. Bill Bryson _ Neither Here Nor There:

    Italians are entirely without any commitment to order. They live their lives in a kind of pandemonium, which I find very attractive.
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  7. Bill Bryson _ Neither Here Nor There:

    noticed on my city map that just up the road was the Musée International de la Croix-Rouge et du Croissant-Rouge {the International Museum of the Red Cross and Red Breakfast Roll}, which sounded much more promising to me.
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  8. Bill Bryson _ Neither Here Nor There:

    I took a big draft of my beer, warmed by my reminiscences, and quietly delighted at the thought that my schooldays were forever behind me, that never again for as long as I lived would I have to bevel an edge or elucidate the principles of the Volstead Act in not less than 250 words or give even a mouse-sized shit about which far-flung countries produce jute and what they do with it. It is a thought that never fails to cheer me. In
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  9. Bill Bryson _ Neither Here Nor There:

    I took off my boot and sock and examined my ankle, expecting-and indeed, in that perverse manner of the injured male, rather hoping-to find some splintered bone straining at the skin like a tent pole, making everyone who saw it queasy. But the ankle was just faintly bluish and tender and very slightly swollen, and I realized that once more in my life I had merely achieved acute pain and not the sort of grotesque injury that would lead to a mercy flight by helicopter and a fussing-over by young nurses in erotically starched uniforms.
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  10. Bill Bryson _ Neither Here Nor There:

    the only English-language publication on offer was the weekend edition of USA Today, a publication that always puts me in mind of a newspaper we used to get in grade school called My Weekly Reader. I am amazed enough that they can find buyers for USA Today in the U.S.A., but the possibility that anyone would ever present himself at the station kiosk in Buchs, Switzerland, and ask for it seemed to me to set a serious challenge to the laws of probability.
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  11. Bill Bryson _ Neither Here Nor There:

    All the light switches in the hallways were timed to go off after ten or fifteen seconds, presumably as an economy measure. This wasn't so bad if your room was next to the elevator, but if it was very far down the hall, and hotel hallways in Paris tend to wander around like an old man with Alzheimer's, you would generally proceed the last furlong in total blackness, feeling your way along the walls with flattened palms, and invariably colliding scrotally with the corner of a nineteenth-century oak table put there, evidently, for that purpose.
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  12. Bill Bryson _ Neither Here Nor There:

    Romans park their cars the way I would park if I had just spilled a beaker of hydrochloric acid on my lap.
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