Martha

“I know a man who drives 600 yards to work. I know a woman who gets in her car to go a quarter of a mile to a college gymnasium to walk on a treadmill, then complains passionately about the difficulty of finding a parking space. When I asked her once why she didn't walk to the gym and do five minutes less on the treadmill, she looked at me as if I were being willfully provocative. 'Because I have a program for the treadmill,' she explained. 'It records my distance and speed, and I can adjust it for degree of difficulty.' It hadn't occurred to me how thoughtlessly deficient nature is in this regard.”
― Bill Bryson, A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail

“As my father always used to tell me, 'You see, son, there's always someone in the world worse off than you.' And I always used to think, 'So?”
― Bill Bryson, The Lost Continent: Travels in Small-Town America

“Of all the things I am not very good at, living in the real world is perhaps the most outstanding.”
― Bill Bryson, I'm a Stranger Here Myself: Notes on Returning to America After Twenty Years Away

“The road to hell is paved with adverbs.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft