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Book: Notes From A Small Island
Quotes of Book: Notes From A Small Island
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  1. Bill Bryson _ Notes From A Small Island

    Calais is an interesting place that exists solely for the purpose of giving English people in shell suits somewhere to go for the day.
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  2. Bill Bryson _ Notes From A Small Island

    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 £4.20, 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.
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  3. Bill Bryson _ Notes From A Small Island

    Is it raining out?' the reception girl asked brightly as I filled in the registration card between sneezes and pauses to wipe water from my face with the back of my arm. 'No, my ship sank and I had to swim the last seven miles.
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  4. Bill Bryson _ Notes From A Small Island

    Built in the hope of distracting workers from the peril of drink, it contained a gymnasium, a laboratory, a billiards room, a library, a reading room, and a lecture and concert hall. Never before had manual workers been given a more lavish opportunity to better themselves, an opportunity that many scores enthusiastically seized. One James Waddington, an untutored woolsorter, became a world authority on linguistics and a leading light of the Phonetic Society of Great Britain and Ireland.
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  5. Bill Bryson _ Notes From A Small Island

    I sat there for some time, a young man with more on his mind than in it.
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  6. Bill Bryson _ Notes From A Small Island

    Several of the houses have been mildly disfigured by the careless addition of electrical wires to their façades {something that other less intellectually distracted nations would put inside} but never mind.
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  7. Bill Bryson _ Notes From A Small Island

    At the far end, a shop called the Boscombe Antique Market had a big sign in the window that said 'We Buy Anything!', which seemed an unusually generous offer, so I went inside, gobbed on the counter and barked, 'How much for that then?' I didn't, of course – it was shut – but I'd have liked to. It
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  8. Bill Bryson _ Notes From A Small Island

    For reasons I couldn't begin to guess at, a balustrade along the roofline had been adorned with life-sized statues of ordinary men, women and children. Goodness knows what this is meant to suggest – I suppose that this is some sort of Hall of the People – but the effect is that it looks as if two dozen citizens of various ages are about to commit mass suicide.
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  9. Bill Bryson _ Notes From A Small Island

    It was full of lazy late-afternoon shadows and an impossible green lushness such as could only be appreciated by someone freshly arrived
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  10. Bill Bryson _ Notes From A Small Island

    It took 500 men just to pull each sarsen, plus 100 more to dash around positioning the rollers. Just think about it for a minute. Can you imagine trying to talk 600 people into helping you drag a 50-ton stone 18 miles across the countryside, muscle it into an upright position and then saying, 'Right, lads! Another twenty like that, plus some lintels and maybe a couple of dozen nice bluestones from Wales, and we can party!' Whoever was the person behind Stonehenge was one dickens of a motivator, I'll tell you that.
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  11. Bill Bryson _ Notes From A Small Island

    One day in 1987 Fallows was standing at a window in a London bank waiting to be served when a would-be robber named Douglas Bath stepped in front of him, brandished a handgun and demanded money from the cashier. Outraged, Fallows told Bath to 'bugger off' to the back of the line and wait his turn, to the presumed approving nods of others in the queue. Unprepared for this turn of events, Bath meekly departed from the bank empty-handed and was arrested a short distance away.
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  12. Bill Bryson _ Notes From A Small Island

    I remember once reading that the tenth Duke of Marlborough, on a visit to one of his daughter's homes, announced in consternation from the top of the stairs that his toothbrush wasn't foaming properly. It turned out that his valet had always put toothpaste on his brush for him, and as a consequence the duke was unaware that dental implements didn't foam up spontaneously. I rest my case.
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