The Lost Continent Quotes

“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

“I mused for a few moments on the question of which was worse, to lead a life so boring that you are easily enchanted, or a life so full of stimulus that you are easily bored.”
― Bill Bryson, Lost Continent: Travels In Small-Town America

“I was heading to Nebraska. Now there's a sentence you don't want to say too often if you can possibly help it.”
― Bill Bryson, The Lost Continent: Travels in Small-Town America

“I became quietly seized with that nostalgia that overcomes you when you have reached the middle of your life and your father has recently died and it dawns on you that when he went he took some of you with him.”
― Bill Bryson, The Lost Continent: Travels in Small-Town America

“At the foot of the mountain, the park ended and suddenly all was squalor again. I was once more struck by this strange compartmentalization that goes on in America -- a belief that no commercial activities must be allowed inside the park, but permitting unrestrained development outside, even though the landscape there may be just as outstanding. America has never quite grasped that you can live in a place without making it ugly, that beauty doesn't have to be confined behind fences, as if a national park were a sort of zoo for nature.”
― Bill Bryson, Lost Continent: Travels In Small-Town America

“And before long there will be no more milk in bottles delivered to the doorstep or sleepy rural pubs, and the countryside will be mostly shopping centers and theme parks. Forgive me. I don't mean to get upset. But you are taking my world away from me, piece by little piece, and sometimes it just pisses me off. Sorry.”
― Bill Bryson, The Lost Continent: Travels in Small-Town America

“Why is it, I wondered, that old people are always so self-centered and excitable? But I just smiled benignly and stood back, comforted by the thought that soon they would be dead.”
― Bill Bryson, The Lost Continent: Travels in Small-Town America

“Still, I never really mind bad service in a restaurant. It makes me feel better about not leaving a tip.”
― Bill Bryson, The Lost Continent: Travels in Small-Town America

“In the morning I awoke early and experienced that sinking sensation that overcomes you when you first open your eyes and realize that instead of a normal day ahead of you, with its scatterings of simple gratifications, you are going to have a day without even the tiniest of pleasures; you are going to drive across Ohio.”
― Bill Bryson, The Lost Continent: Travels in Small-Town America

“In this he was like most Midwesterners. Directions are very important to them. They have an innate need to be oriented, even in their anecdotes. Any story related by a Midwesterner will wander off at some point into a thicket of interior monologue along the lines of "We were staying at a hotel that was eight blocks northeast of the state capital building. Come to think of it, it was northwest. And I think it was probably more like nine blocks. And this woman without any clothes on, naked as the day she was born except for a coonskin cap, came running at us from the southwest... or was it the southeast?" If there are two Midwesterns present and they both witnessed the incident, you can just about write off the anecdote because they will spend the rest of the afternoon arguing points of the compass and will never get back to the original story. You can always tell a Midwestern couple in Europe because they will be standing on a traffic island in the middle of a busy intersection looking at a windblown map and arguing over which way is west. European cities, with their wandering streets and undisciplined alleys, drive Midwesterners practically insane.”
― Bill Bryson, The Lost Continent: Travels in Small-Town America

“As I always used to tell Thomas Wolfe, there are three things you just can’t do in life. You can’t beat the phone company, you can’t make a waiter see you until he’s ready to see you, and you can’t go home again.”
― Bill Bryson, The Lost Continent: Travels in Small-Town America

“[Traveling] makes you realize what an immeasurably nice place much of America could be if only people possessed the same instinct for preservation as they do in Europe. You would think the millions of people who come to Williamsburg every year would say to each other, "Gosh, Bobbi, this place is beautiful. Let's go home to Smellville and plant lots of trees and preserve all the fine old buildings." But in fact that never occurs to them. They just go back and build more parking lots and Pizza Huts.”
― Bill Bryson, The Lost Continent: Travels in Small-Town America

“The waitress, seeing how much I had left, asked me if I wanted a doggie bag. ‘No thank you,’ I said through a thin smile, ‘I don’t believe I could find a dog that would eat it.”
― Bill Bryson, The Lost Continent: Travels in Small-Town America

“When they aren’t being incompetent, city officials like to relax with a little corruption.”
― Bill Bryson, The Lost Continent: Travels in Small-Town America

“The youth of Idaho falls should be encouraged to take drugs in order to cope up with the fact that there is plutonium in their drinking water.”
― Bill Bryson, The Lost Continent: Travels in Small-Town America

“Sometimes it rained, but mostly it was just dull, a land without shadows. It was like living inside Tupperware.”
― Bill Bryson, The Lost Continent: Travels in Small-Town America

“Where the weather is concerned, the Midwest has the worst of both worlds. In the winter the wind is razor sharp. It skims down from the Arctic and slices through you. It howls and swirls and buffets the house. It brings piles of snow and bonecracking cold. From November to March you walk leaning forward at a twenty-degree angle, even indoors, and spend your life waiting for your car to warm up, or digging it out of drifts or scraping futilely at ice that seems to have been applied to the windows with superglue. And then one day spring comes. The snow melts, you stride about in shirtsleeves, you incline your face to the sun. And then, just like that, spring is over and it’s summer. It is as if God has pulled a lever in the great celestial powerhouse. Now the weather rolls in from the opposite direction, from the tropics far to the south, and it hits you like a wall of heat. For six months, the heat pours over you. You sweat oil. Your pores gape. The grass goes brown. Dogs look as if they could die. When you walk downtown you can feel the heat of the pavement rising through the soles of your shoes. Just when you think you might very well go crazy, fall comes and for two or three weeks the air is mild and nature is friendly. And then it’s winter and the cycle starts again. And you think, “As soon as I’m big enough, I’m going to move far, far away from here.”
― Bill Bryson, The Lost Continent: Travels in Small Town America

“My first rule of consumerism is never buy anything you can’t make your children carry.”
― Bill Bryson, The Lost Continent: Travels in Small Town America

“The most splendid thing about the Amish is the names they give their towns. Everywhere else in America towns are named either after the first white person to get there or the last Indian to leave. But the Amish obviously gave the matter of town names some thought and graced their communities with intriguing, not to say provocative, appellations: Blue Ball, Bird in Hand, and Intercourse, to name but three. Intercourse makes a good living by attracting passers-by such as me who think it the height of hilarity to send their friends and colleagues postcards with an Intercourse postal mark and some droll sentiment scribbled on the back.”
― Bill Bryson, The Lost Continent: Travels in Small-Town America

“Eventually, mercifully, the waitress prised the spoons out of our hands and took the dessert stuff away, and we were able to stumble zombielike out into the night.”
― Bill Bryson, The Lost Continent: Travels in Small-Town America

“And there you have the difference between the Midwest and the West, ladies and gentlemen. People in the Midwest are nice.”
― Bill Bryson, The Lost Continent: Travels in Small Town America

“Generally speaking – which is of course always a dangerous thing to do, generally speaking – Americans revere the past only as long as there is some money in it somewhere and it doesn’t mean going without air-conditioning, free parking and other essential conveniences.”
― Bill Bryson, The Lost Continent: Travels in Small-Town America

“A few months earlier, when a state official named Bud Dwyer was similarly accused of corruption, he called a press conference, pulled out a gun and, as cameras rolled, blew his brains out. This led to an excellent local joke.”
― Bill Bryson, The Lost Continent: Travels in Small-Town America

“I read once that it takes 75,000 trees to produce one issue of the Sunday New York Times — and it's well worth every trembling leaf. So what if our grandchildren have no oxygen to breathe? Fuck 'em.”
― Bill Bryson, The Lost Continent: Travels in Small-Town America

“The parking lot was almost empty, except for an old bus from which a load of senior citizens were disembarking. The bus was from the Calvary Baptist Church in someplace like Firecracker, Georgia, or Bareassed, Alabama. The old people were noisy and excited, like schoolchildren, and pushed in front of me at the ticket booth, little realizing that I wouldn't hesitate to give an old person a shove, especially a Baptist. Why is it, I wondered, that old people are always so self-centered and excitable? But I just smiled benignly and stood back, comforted by the thought that soon they would be dead.”
― Bill Bryson, The Lost Continent: Travels in Small-Town America

“It's the place you would go if you wanted to buy a stereo system for under thirty-five dollars and didn't care if it sounded like the band was playing in a mailbox under water in a distant lake.”
― Bill Bryson, The Lost Continent: Travels in Small-Town America

“They become obsessed with trying to equip their vehicles with gadgets to deal with every possible contingency. Their lives become ruled by the dread thought that one day they may find themselves in a situation in which they are not entirely self-sufficient. I once went camping for two days at Lake Darling in Iowa with a friend whose father—an RV enthusiast—kept trying to press labor-saving devices on us. “I got a great little solar-powered can opener here,” he would say. “You wanna take that?”
― Bill Bryson, The Lost Continent: Travels in Small Town America

“Nowadays they don't show test patterns at all on American TV, which is a shame because given a choice between test patterns and TV evangelists, I would unhesitatingly choose the test patterns. They were soothing in an odd way and, of course, they didn't ask you for money or make you listen to their son-in-law sing.”
― Bill Bryson, The Lost Continent: Travels in Small-Town America

“It had never once occurred to me in thirty-six years of living that anyone listened to Mexican music for pleasure. Yet here there were a dozen stations blaring it out. After each song, a disc jockey would come on and jabber for a minute or two in Spanish in the tone of a man who has just had his nuts slammed in a drawer.”
― Bill Bryson, The Lost Continent: Travels in Small Town America

“You could see in an instant that she had been the local good-time girl since about 1931. She had “Ready for Sex” written all over her face, but “Better Bring a Paper Bag” written all over her body.”
― Bill Bryson, The Lost Continent: Travels in Small Town America