Bryson City Quotes & Sayings

H. L. Mencken called it "the one authentic rectum of civilization," but for most people Hollywood was a place of magic. In 1927, the iconic sign on the hillside above the city actually said HOLLYWOODLAND. It had been erected in 1923 to advertise a real estate development and had nothing to do with motion pictures. The letters, each over forty feet high, were in those days also traced out with electric lights. (The LAND was removed in 1949.) — Bill Bryson

It is precisely our egoism, our self-centeredness and self-love that cause all our difficulties, our lack of freedom in suffering, our disappointments and our anguish of soul and body. — Tito Colliander

There were times in my career ... when I felt like a trapeze artist doing dangerous somersaults without a net underneath. When you execute those somersaults flawlessly, the audience feels the same sense of triumph the performer does. — Beverly Sills

Leaders heal; they don't kill. They unite; they don't disintegrate. — Israelmore Ayivor

Is there anything, apart from a really good chocolate cream pie and receiving a large unexpected cheque in the post, to beat finding yourself at large in a foreign city on a fair spring evening, loafing along unfamiliar streets in the long shadows of a lazy sunset, pausing to gaze in shop windows or at some church or lovely square or tranquil stretch of quayside, hesitating at street corners to decide whether that cheerful and homy restaurant you will remember fondly for years is likely to lie down this street or that one? I just love it. I could spend my life arriving each evening in a new city. — Bill Bryson

First don't panic, second don't panic and third DID I MENTCHIN NOT TO PANIC?! — Hayao Miyazaki

If all the ice sheets melted, sea levels would rise by 60 metres - the height of a twenty-storey building - and every coastal city in the world would be inundated. — Bill Bryson

Beware what you speak,' said the Merlin very softly, 'for indeed the words we speak make shadows of what is to come, and by speaking them we bring them to pass, my king. — Marion Zimmer Bradley

Partly for this reason Sir Thomas Gresham had recently built the Royal Exchange, the most fabulous commercial building of its day. (Gresham is traditionally associated with Gresham's law - that bad money drives out good - which he may or may not actually have formulated.) Modeled on the Bourse in Antwerp, the Exchange contained 150 small shops, making it one of the world's first shopping malls, but its primary purpose and virtue was that for the first time it allowed City merchants - some four thousand of them - to conduct their business indoors out of the rain. We may marvel that they waited so long to escape the English weather, but there we are. — Bill Bryson

It's not even possible to say quite where the outback is. To Australians anything vaguely rural is "the bush." At some indeterminate point "the bush" becomes "the outback." Push on for another two thousand miles or so and eventually you come to bush again, and then a city, and then the sea. And that's Australia. — Bill Bryson

Dadaab is a vivid reminder that refugee problems don't end simply because journalistic interest moves elsewhere. The inhabitants themselves are irremediably stuck. They can't go back to Somalia because it isn't safe and they can't go elsewhere in Kenya because Kenya has problems enough of its own without having 134,000 Somalis pitching up in Nairobi or Mombasa, looking for food and work. And so way out in the desert there exists this strange city-that-isn't-a-city filled with people who have nowhere to go and nothing much to do. — Bill Bryson

To be stuck with that Kardashian label, that was so hurtful to me and to my career. I probably realized that too late - not that it would've affected my decisions in terms of who I dated, but it would've affected my decision to appear on the show. — Adrienne Bailon

With the canal, the cost of shipping a ton of flour from Buffalo to New York City fell from $120 a ton to $6 a ton, and the carrying time was reduced from three weeks to just over one. The effect on New York's fortunes was breathtaking. Its share of national exports leaped from less than 10 percent in 1800 to over 60 percent by the middle of the century; in the same period, even more dazzlingly, its population went from ten thousand to well over half a million. — Bill Bryson

Imagine having a city full of things that no other city had. — Bill Bryson

Chicago in the twenties may have been corrupt, but it was not really as violent as reputation has it. With an annual rate of 13.3 murders per every 100,000 people, it was indubitably more homicidal than New York, with 6.1, Los Angeles, with 4.7, or Boston, with just 3.9 - but it was less dangerous than Detroit, at 16.8, or almost any city in the South. New Orleans had a murder rate of 25.9 per 100,000, while Little Rock had a rate of 37.9, Miami 40, Atlanta 43.4, and Charlotte 55.5. Memphis was miles ahead of all other cities, with a truly whopping rate of 69.3. The average in America today, you may be surprised and comforted to hear, is 6 murders per 100,000 people. — Bill Bryson

I remember a hundred lovely lakes, and recall the fragrant breath of pine and fir and cedar and poplar trees. The trail has strung upon it, as upon a thread of silk, opalescent dawns and saffron sunsets. It has given me blessed release from care and worry and the troubled thinking of our modern day. It has been a return to the primitive and the peaceful. Whenever the pressure of our complex city life thins my blood and benumbs my brain, I seek relief in the trail; and when I hear the coyote wailing to the yellow dawn, my cares fall from me - I am happy. ~Hamlin Garland, McClure's, February 1899 — Hamlin Garland

I'm often amazed at the way politicians, who spend hours poring over opinion poll results in a desperate attempt to discover what the public thinks, are certain they know precisely what God's views are on everything. — Simon Hoggart

You are a winner; dare to claim it. You reserve your joy if you reverse your belief. You deserve to celebrate ... It will happen when you dare to believe in God! — Israelmore Ayivor

You really are Captain Oblivious. — Lee Davidson

War and marketing have many similarities. — Al Ries

Smiling is the worst thing you can do if you want the world to think you're okay when you're not. Some people can't help it - it's like a tic, a tell - and others do it on purpose, thinking people will buy whatever they're selling if it comes with a flash of teeth. But the truth is, smiling only makes a lie harder to pass off. It's like a giant crack in the front of a mask. — Victoria Schwab

So I decided to do it [hike the Appalachian Trail]. More rashly, I announced my intention - told friends and neighbors, confidently informed my publisher, made it common knowledge among those who knew me. Then I bought some books ... It required only a little light reading in adventure books and almost no imagination to envision circumstances in which I would find myself caught in a tightening circle of hunger-emboldened wolves, staggering and shredding clothes under an onslaught of pincered fire ants, or dumbly transfixed by the sight of enlivened undergrowth advancing towards me, like a torpedo through water, before being bowled backwards by a sofa-sized boar with cold beady eyes, a piercing squeal, and slaverous, chopping appetite for pink, plump, city-softened flesh. — Bill Bryson

Looked at from above, west London isn't so much a city as a forest with buildings. — Bill Bryson

Bulgaria, I reflected as I walked back to the hotel, isn't a country; it's a near-death experience. — Bill Bryson

A teenage taste of beer aside, Mitt Romney does not consume alcohol. Which begs the question, will total abstention put his candidacy, perhaps even this great nation in jeopardy? — Martin Bashir

Following the rules for the past seventeen years has gotten me absolutely nowhere. I really need to do something about that. — Jessica Love

I love the feeling of being anonymous in a city I've never been before. — Bill Bryson

I think it's only right that crazy people should have their own city, but I cannot for the life of me see why a sane person would want to go there. — Bill Bryson

Des Moines is like your typical American city; it's just these concentric circles of malls, built outward from the city. — Bill Bryson