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Book: The Road to Little Dribbling: More Notes from a Small Island
Quotes of Book: The Road to Little Dribbling:
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  1. Bill Bryson _ The Road to Little Dribbling:

    It's a funny thing because Britain was in a terrible state in those days. It limped from crisis to crisis. It was known as the Sick Man of Europe. It was in every way poorer than now. Yet there were flower beds in roundabouts, libraries and post offices in every village, cottage hospitals in abundance, council housing for all who needed it. It was a country so comfortable and enlightened that hospitals maintained cricket pitches for their staff and mental patients lived in Victorian palaces.
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  2. Bill Bryson _ The Road to Little Dribbling:

    Percy Bysshe {the only poet named for the sound of a match hitting water},
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  3. Bill Bryson _ The Road to Little Dribbling:

    I quite like Torquay and might one day come back, but I can tell you this now: where watch batteries are concerned, they can go fuck themselves.
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  4. Bill Bryson _ The Road to Little Dribbling:

    That is the problem with Scotland, I find. You never know whether the next person you meet is going to offer you his bone marrow or nut you with his forehead. Afterward
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  5. Bill Bryson _ The Road to Little Dribbling:

    Out of all the incursions, the only permanent one so far is the present one, and that dates from just twelve thousand years ago, which means that Britain is actually one of the more recent places in the world to become inhabited by modern people. In this sense it is much younger than the Americas or Australia. The"
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  6. Bill Bryson _ The Road to Little Dribbling:

    The Greater London Development Plan would have cost a then-colossal £2 billion, making it the biggest public investment ever made in Britain. That was its salvation. Britain couldn't afford it. In the end, the visionaries were undone by the unmanageable scale of their own ambitions. It
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  7. Bill Bryson _ The Road to Little Dribbling:

    In Iowa, we were not used to seeing the houses of well-known people on account of there were no well-known people in Iowa.
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  8. Bill Bryson _ The Road to Little Dribbling:

    here is a new rule: If you are too stupid to spell "disappointed" even approximately correctly, you are not allowed to take part in public discourse at any level. Trawling
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  9. Bill Bryson _ The Road to Little Dribbling:

    Thank you," I said and then abruptly leaned across the counter and with two forked fingers poked him sharply in the eyes. Actually, I didn't do that. I just imagined it. But imagining it made me feel better. I
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  10. Bill Bryson _ The Road to Little Dribbling:

    I am so well prepared financially that I have money in a range of currencies that no longer exist. I
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  11. Bill Bryson _ The Road to Little Dribbling:

    What a wonderful world that was, and how remote it seems now. It is a challenge to believe that there was ever a time that airline food was exciting, when stewardesses were happy to see you, when flying was such an occasion that you wore your finest clothes. I grew up in a world in which everything was like that: shopping malls, TV dinners, TV itself, supermarkets, freeways, air conditioning, drive-in movies, 3D movies, transistor radios, backyard barbecues, air travel as a commonplace-all were brand-new and marvelously exciting. It is amazing we didn't choke to death on all the novelty and wonder in our lives. I remember once my father brought home a device that you plugged in and, with an enormous amount of noise and energy, it turned ice cubes into shaved ice, and we got excited about that. We were idiots really, but awfully happy, too. -
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  12. Bill Bryson _ The Road to Little Dribbling:

    But for reasons that genuinely escape me, it has also become spectacularly accommodating to stupidity. Where this thought most recently occurred to me was in a hotel coffee shop in Baltimore, where I was reading the local paper, the Sun, and I saw a news item noting that Congress had passed a law prohibiting the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services from funding research that might lead, directly or indirectly, to the introduction of gun controls. Let me repeat that but in slightly different words. The government of the United States refuses to let academics use federal money to study gun violence if there is a chance that they might find a way of reducing the violence. It isn't possible to be more stupid than that. If you took all the commentators from FOX News and put them together in a room and told them to come up with an idea even more pointlessly idiotic, they couldn't do it. Britain isn't like that, and thank goodness. On tricky and emotive issues like gun control, abortion, capital punishment, the teaching of evolution in schools, the use of stem cells for research, and how much flag waving you have to do in order to be considered acceptably patriotic, Britain is calm and measured and quite grown up, and for me that counts for a great deal. -
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