top of page
.png){kind=small}
"I turned to my own bunk and examined it with a kind of appalled fascination. If the mattress stains were anything to go by, a previous user had not so much suffered from incontinence as rejoiced in it. He had evidently included the pillow in his celebrations."
Standard
Customized
Exlpore more Absurdity quotes
"This is wonderful, wonderful! Be the bird. You are the bird. Sacrifice yourself to abandoned family values...."
"What is existence for but to be laughed at if men in their twenties have already attained the utmost?"
"Flowers are evil, because they live just to die for the love of other people. You don't believe me? Try it for yourself and see if you'll be good afterwards. Undeath is a way of life, for some things. That doesn't make it good or anything. Especially anything. Nothing makes anything anything. Because nothing is a serious matter, and anything just is."
"We will then hear from the founder of the Mayo Clinic . . . Dr. Ted Clinic."
"I have a hobby. I have the world's largest collection of sea shells. I keep it scattered on beaches all over the world. Maybe you've seen some of it."
Explore more quotes by Bill Bryson
"It is not true that the English invented cricket as a way of making all other human endeavors look interesting and lively, that was merely an unintended side effect."
"For the moment we might very well can them DUNNOS (for Dark Unknown Nonreflective Nondetectable Objects Somewhere)."
"Roads get wider and busier and less friendly to pedestrians. And all of the development based around cars, like big sprawling shopping malls. Everything seems to be designed for the benefit of the automobile and not the benefit of the human being."
"Describing his experience with the sting of an extremely toxic jellyfish, he did something you don't often see a scientist do: he shivered."
"As humans we are inclined to feel that life must have a point. We have plans and aspirations and desires. We want to take constant advantage of all the intoxicating existence we've been endowed with. But what's life to a cell? Yet it's impulse to exist, to be, is every bit as strong as ours - perhaps even stronger. Life just wants to be."
"If the mattress stains were anything to go by, a previous user had not so much suffered from incontinence as rejoiced in it."
"It was the kind of pure, undiffused light that can only come from a really hot blue sky, the kind that makes even a concrete highway painful to behold and turns every distant reflective surface into a little glint of flame. Do you know how sometimes on very fine days the sun will shine with a particular intensity that makes the most mundane objects in the landscape glow with an unusual radiance, so that buildings and structures you normally pass without a glance suddenly become arresting, even beautiful? Well, they seem to have that light in Australia nearly all the time."
"And there was never a better time to delve for pleasure in language than the sixteenth century, when novelty blew through English like a spring breeze. Some twelve thousand words, a phenomenal number, entered the language between 1500 and 1650, about half of them still in use today, and old words were employed in ways not tried before. Nouns became verbs and adverbs; adverbs became adjectives. Expressions that could not have grammatically existed before - such as 'breathing one's last' and 'backing a horse', both coined by Shakespeare - were suddenly popping up everywhere."
"The pleasant fact is that the British are not much good at violent crime except in fiction, which is of course as it should be."
bottom of page