William > William's Quotes

“Dismissed!” shouted Irina that night in their little apartment. “How does one get fired from Communism!”
― Amor Towles, Table for Two

“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, Neither Here nor There: Travels in Europe

“Just imagine what will happen when the lines to Belgium and Germany are completed and connected up with their railways! I feel as if the mountains and forests of all countries were advancing on Paris. Even now, I can smell the German linden trees; the North Sea’s breakers are rolling against my door.”
― Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the 19th Century

“The Mediterranean, which is now only a week from us, has before our eyes shrunk into a lake; our British and Irish channels are scarcely broader than the old Firth of Forth; the Rhine, the Danube, the Thames, the Medway, the Ganges etc., have contracted their streams to infinitely less than half their lengths and breadths, and the great lakes of the world are rapidly drying into ponds!”
― Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the 19th Century

“But that's the glory of foreign travel, as far as I am concerned. I don't want to know what people are talking about. I can't think of anything that excites a greater sense of childlike wonder than to be in a country where you are ignorant of almost everything. Suddenly you are five years old again. You can't read anything, you have only the most rudimentary sense of how things work, you can't even reliably cross a street without endangering your life. Your whole existence becomes a series of interesting guesses.”
― Bill Bryson, Neither Here nor There: Travels in Europe

“At each crossing, faced with the decision of whether to go left, right, or straight ahead, the young man may rely upon the advice he has been given as a child, or the sum of his experiences, or the flip of a coin. But of all the forces that are likely to influence him as he proceeds from one fork to the next, there are few more powerful than the moderate increase in income.”
― Amor Towles, Table for Two

“And suddenly I realise that civilisation is suffering from a severe vitamin deficiency because it cannot draw its strength directly from nature, eternally young and eternally true. Humanity has lost itself in the unnatural and in speculation. Only now do I grasp the real meaning and the world-transforming element in the saying: “Become as the peasants, understand the sacredness of the earth.”
― Christiane Ritter, A Woman in the Polar Night

“The whole length of Nyhavn was lined with outdoor tables, with young, blond, gorgeous people drinking, eating and enjoying the unseasonably warm weather. I always wonder in Copenhagen what they do with their old people – they must put them in cellars or send them to Arizona – because everyone, without exception, is youthful, fresh-scrubbed, healthy, blond and immensely good-looking. You could cast a Pepsi commercial in Copenhagen in fifteen seconds. And they all look so happy.”
― Bill Bryson, Neither Here nor There: Travels in Europe

“Vienna is certainly the grandest city I have ever seen. All along the Ringstrasse colossal buildings proclaim an imperial past – the parliament, the Palace of Justice, the Natural History Museum, the Kunsthistorisches Museum, the opera house, the Burgtheater and above all the Hofburg, with its 2,600 rooms. They all look much the same – mighty piles of granite and sandstone with warlike statuary crowded along the roofs and pediments. A Martian coming to earth would unhesitatingly land at Vienna, thinking it the capital of the planet.”
― Bill Bryson, Neither Here nor There: Travels in Europe

“Romans park their cars the way I would park if I had just spilled a beaker of hydrochloric acid on my lap.”
― Bill Bryson, Neither Here Nor There: Travels in Europe

“The best that can be said for Norwegian television is that it gives you the sensation of a coma without the worry and inconvenience.”
― Bill Bryson, Neither Here Nor There: Travels in Europe