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Book: The Lost Continent: Travels in Small Town America
Quotes of Book: The Lost Continent: Travels in
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  1. Bill Bryson _ The Lost Continent: Travels in

    The parking lot was almost empty, except for an old bus from which a load of senior citizens were disembarking. The bus was from the Calvary Baptist Church in someplace like Firecracker, Georgia, or Bareassed, Alabama. The old people were noisy and excited, like schoolchildren, and pushed in front of me at the ticket booth, little realizing that I wouldn't hesitate to give an old person a shove, especially a Baptist. Why is it, I wondered, that old people are always so self-centered and excitable? But I just smiled benignly and stood back, comforted by the thought that soon they would be dead.
    book-quote

  2. Bill Bryson _ The Lost Continent: Travels in

    I read once that it takes 75,000 trees to produce one issue of the Sunday New York Times - and it's well worth every trembling leaf. So what if our grandchildren have no oxygen to breathe? Fuck 'em.
    book-quote

  3. Bill Bryson _ The Lost Continent: Travels in

    The youth of Idaho falls should be encouraged to take drugs in order to cope up with the fact that there is plutonium in their drinking water.
    book-quoteidahoplutonium

  4. Bill Bryson _ The Lost Continent: Travels in

    My first rule of consumerism is never buy anything you can't make your children carry.
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  5. Bill Bryson _ The Lost Continent: Travels in

    The most splendid thing about the Amish is the names they give their towns. Everywhere else in America towns are named either after the first white person to get there or the last Indian to leave. But the Amish obviously gave the matter of town names some thought and graced their communities with intriguing, not to say provocative, appellations: Blue Ball, Bird in Hand, and Intercourse, to name but three. Intercourse makes a good living by attracting passers-by such as me who think it the height of hilarity to send their friends and colleagues postcards with an Intercourse postal mark and some droll sentiment scribbled on the back.
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  6. Bill Bryson _ The Lost Continent: Travels in

    Eventually, mercifully, the waitress prised the spoons out of our hands and took the dessert stuff away, and we were able to stumble zombielike out into the night.
    book-quotehumor

  7. Bill Bryson _ The Lost Continent: Travels in

    Sometimes it rained, but mostly it was just dull, a land without shadows. It was like living inside Tupperware.
    book-quoteweathertupperware

  8. Bill Bryson _ The Lost Continent: Travels in

    As I always used to tell Thomas Wolfe, there are three things you just can't do in life. You can't beat the phone company, you can't make a waiter see you until he's ready to see you, and you can't go home again."
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  9. Bill Bryson _ The Lost Continent: Travels in

    {Traveling} makes you realize what an immeasurably nice place much of America could be if only people possessed the same instinct for preservation as they do in Europe. You would think the millions of people who come to Williamsburg every year would say to each other, "Gosh, Bobbi, this place is beautiful. Let's go home to Smellville and plant lots of trees and preserve all the fine old buildings." But in fact that never occurs to them. They just go back and build more parking lots and Pizza Huts.
    book-quotetravelhistoric-preservation

  10. Bill Bryson _ The Lost Continent: Travels in

    In this he was like most Midwesterners. Directions are very important to them. They have an innate need to be oriented, even in their anecdotes. Any story related by a Midwesterner will wander off at some point into a thicket of interior monologue along the lines of "We were staying at a hotel that was eight blocks northeast of the state capital building. Come to think of it, it was northwest. And I think it was probably more like nine blocks. And this woman without any clothes on, naked as the day she was born except for a coonskin cap, came running at us from the southwest... or was it the southeast?" If there are two Midwesterns present and they both witnessed the incident, you can just about write off the anecdote because they will spend the rest of the afternoon arguing points of the compass and will never get back to the original story. You can always tell a Midwestern couple in Europe because they will be standing on a traffic island in the middle of a busy intersection looking at a windblown map and arguing over which way is west. European cities, with their wandering streets and undisciplined alleys, drive Midwesterners practically insane.
    book-quotemidwesterners

  11. Bill Bryson _ The Lost Continent: Travels in

    In the morning I awoke early and experienced that sinking sensation that overcomes you when you first open your eyes and realize that instead of a normal day ahead of you, with its scatterings of simple gratifications, you are going to have a day without even the tiniest of pleasures; you are going to drive across Ohio.
    book-quote

  12. Bill Bryson _ The Lost Continent: Travels in

    And before long there will be no more milk in bottles delivered to the doorstep or sleepy rural pubs, and the countryside will be mostly shopping centers and theme parks. Forgive me. I don't mean to get upset. But you are taking my world away from me, piece by little piece, and sometimes it just pisses me off. Sorry.
    book-quote
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