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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

    To say that Windermere is popular with boaters is to flirt recklessly with understatement.
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  2. Bill Bryson _ Notes from a Small Island

    I took a train to Liverpool. they were having a festival when I arrived. Citizens had taken time off from their busy activities to add crisp packets, empty cigarette boxes and carrier-bags to the other wise bland and neglected landscape.
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  3. Bill Bryson _ Notes from a Small Island

    And so one more to the wandering road. Beyond Blackheath the highway began a steep and curvaceous descent towards Lithgow, where it skirted along hem of the mountains...
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  4. Bill Bryson _ Notes from a Small Island

    Here are instructions for being a pigeon: {1} Walk around aimlessly for a while, pecking at cigarette butts and other inappropriate items. {2} Take fright at someone walking along the platform and fly off to a girder. {3} Have a shit. {4} Repeat.
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  5. Bill Bryson _ Notes from a Small Island

    I passed the time browsing in the windows of the many tourists shops that stand along it, reflecting on what a lot of things the Scots have given the world-kilts, bagpipes, tam-o'-shanters, tins of oatcakes, bright yellow sweaters with big diamond patterns, sacks of haggis-and how little anyone but a Scot would want them. Let
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  6. Bill Bryson _ Notes from a Small Island

    The way I see it, there are three reasons never to be unhappy. First, you were born. This in itself is a remarkable achievement.
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  7. Bill Bryson _ Notes from a Small Island

    We clambered for hours up vast, perpendicular slopes, over clattering scree and lumpy tussocks, round towering citadels of rock, and emerged at length into a cold, bleak, lofty nether world so remote and forbidding that even the sheep were startled to see us.
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  8. Bill Bryson _ Notes from a Small Island

    Oh, go on' you prod encouragingly. 'Well, just a small one then,' they say and dartingly take a small one, and then get a look as if they have just done something terribly devilish. All this is completely alien to the American mind. To an American the whole purpose of living, the one constant confirmation of continued existence, is to cram as much sensual pleasure as possible into one's mouth more or less continuously. Gratification, instant and lavish, is a birthright. You might as well say 'Oh, I shouldn't really' if someone tells you to take a deep breath.
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  9. Bill Bryson _ Notes from a Small Island

    The fact is that the British have a totally private sense of distance. This is most visibly seen in the shared pretense that Britain is a lonely island in the middle of an empty green sea. Of course, the British are all aware, in an abstract sort of way, that there is a substantial landmass called Europe nearby and that from time to time it is necessary to go over there to give old Jerry a drubbing or have a holiday in the sun, but it's not nearby in any meaningful sense in the way that, say, Disney World is.
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  10. Bill Bryson _ Notes from a Small Island

    It sometimes occurs to me that the British have more heritage than is good for them. In a country where there is so astonishingly much of everything, it is easy to look on it as a kind of inexhaustible resource.
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  11. Bill Bryson _ Notes from a Small Island

    I can never understand why Londoners fail to see that they live in the most wonderful city in the world. It is, if you ask me, far more beautiful and interesting than Paris and more lively than anywhere but New York-and even New York can't touch it in lots of important ways. It has more history, finer parks, a livelier and more varied press, better theaters, more numerous orchestras and museums, leafier squares, safer streets, and more courteous inhabitants than any other large city in the world.
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  12. Bill Bryson _ Notes from a Small Island

    Second, you are alive. For the tiniest moment in the span of eternity you have the miraculous privilege to exist.
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