I'm a Stranger Here Myself Quotes

“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

“Take a moment from time to time to remember that you are alive. I know this sounds a trifle obvious, but it is amazing how little time we take to remark upon this singular and gratifying fact. By the most astounding stroke of luck an infinitesimal portion of all the matter in the universe came together to create you and for the tiniest moment in the great span of eternity you have the incomparable privilege to exist.”
― Bill Bryson, I'm a Stranger Here Myself: Notes on Returning to America After Twenty Years Away

“Of all the things I am not very good at, living in the real world is perhaps the most outstanding. I am constantly filled with wonder at the number of things that other people do without any evident difficulty that are pretty much beyond me.”
― Bill Bryson, I'm a Stranger Here Myself: Notes on Returning to America After Twenty Years Away

“It was one of those sumptuous days when the world is full of autumn muskiness and tangy, crisp perfection: vivid blue sky, deep green fields, leaves in a thousand luminous hues. It is a truly astounding sight when every tree in a landscape becomes individual, when each winding back highway and plump hillside is suddenly and infinitely splashed with every sharp shade that nature can bestow - flaming scarlet, lustrous gold, throbbing vermilion, fiery orange.”
― Bill Bryson, I'm a Stranger Here Myself: Notes on Returning to America After Twenty Years Away

“Coming back to your native land after an absence of many years is a surprisingly unsettling business, a little like waking up from a long coma.”
― Bill Bryson, I'm a Stranger Here Myself: Notes on Returning to America After Twenty Years Away

“Christmas tree stands are the work of the devil and they want you dead.”
― Bill Bryson, I'm a Stranger Here Myself: Notes on Returning to America After Twenty Years Away

“A computer is a stupid machine with the ability to do incredibly smart things, while computer programmers are smart people with the ability to do incredibly stupid things.”
― Bill Bryson, I'm a Stranger Here Myself: Notes on Returning to America After Twenty Years Away

“... it occurred to me that never again would he be seven years, one month and six days old, so we had better catch these moments while we can.”
― Bill Bryson, I'm a Stranger Here Myself: Notes on Returning to America After Twenty Years Away

“On the dashboard of our family car is a shallow indentation about the size of a paperback book. If you are looking for somewhere to put your sunglasses or spare change, it is the obvious place, and it works extremely well, I must say, so long as the car is not actually moving. However, as soon as you put the car in motion ... everything slides off ... It can hold nothing that has not been nailed to it. So I ask you: what then is it for?”
― Bill Bryson, I'm a Stranger Here Myself: Notes on Returning to America After Twenty Years Away

“Confused and unable to help, my hair went into panic mode.”
― Bill Bryson, I'm a Stranger Here Myself: Notes on Returning to America After Twenty Years Away

“So here I am, my affections torn between a postal service that never feeds me but can tackle a challenge and one that gives me free tape and prompt service but won't help me out when I can't remember a street name. The lesson to draw from this, of course, is that when you move from one country to another you have to accept that there are some things that are better and some things worse, and there is nothing you can do about it. That may not be the profoundest of insights to take away from a morning's outing, but I did get a free doughnut as well, so on balance I guess I'm happy.”
― Bill Bryson, I'm a Stranger Here Myself: Notes on Returning to America After Twenty Years Away

“Take a moment from time to time to remember that you are alive. I know this sounds a trifle obvious, but it is amazing how little time we take to remark upon this singular and gratifying fact. By most astounding stroke of luck and infinitesimal portion of all the matter in the universe came together to create you and for the tiniest moment in the great span of eternity you have the incomparable privilege to exist.

For endless eons there was no you. Before you know it, you will cease to be again. And in between you have this wonderful opportunity to see and feel and think and do. Whatever else you do with your life, nothing will remotely compare with the incredible accomplishment of having managed to get yourself born. Congratulations. Well done. You really are special.”
― Bill Bryson, I'm a Stranger Here Myself: Notes on Returning to America After Twenty Years Away

“It wasn't until we dropped him at his university dormitory and left him there looking touchingly lost and bewildered amid an assortment of cardboard boxes and suitcases in a spartan room not unlike a prison cell that it really hit home that he was vanishing out of our lives and into his own.”
― Bill Bryson, I'm a Stranger Here Myself: Notes on Returning to America After Twenty Years Away

“In office buildings and retail premises in which entry is through double doors and one of those doors is locked for no reason, the door must bear a large sign saying: “This Door Is Locked for No Reason.”
― Bill Bryson, I'm a Stranger Here Myself: Notes on Returning to America After Twenty Years Away

“I love everything about motels. I can't help myself. I still get excited every time I slip a key into a motel room door and fling it open.”
― Bill Bryson, I'm a Stranger Here Myself: Notes on Returning to America After Twenty Years Away

“If you initialed one dollar per second, you would make $1,000 every seventeen minutes. After 12 days of nonstop effort you would acquire your first $1 million. Thus, it would take you 120 days to accumulate $10 million and 1,200 days— something over three years—to reach $100 million. After 31.7 years you would become a billionaire, and after almost a thousand years you would be as wealthy as Bill Gates. But not until after 31,709.8 years would you count your trillionth dollar (and even then you would be less than one-fourth of the way through the pile of money representing America’s national debt). That is what $1 trillion is.”
― Bill Bryson, I'm a Stranger Here Myself: Notes on Returning to America After 20 Years Away

“You have your whole life ahead of you. But here's the thing to remember. You will always have your whole life ahead of you. That never stops and you shouldn't forget it.”
― Bill Bryson, I'm a Stranger Here Myself: Notes on Returning to America After Twenty Years Away

“Don't ever do anything on principle alone. If you haven't got a better reason for doing something other than the principle of the thing, then don't do it.”
― Bill Bryson, I'm a Stranger Here Myself: Notes on Returning to America After Twenty Years Away

“In the United States, frozen cheese pizza is regulated by the Food and Drug Administration. Frozen pepperoni pizza, on the other hand, is regulated by the Department of Agriculture.”
― Bill Bryson, I'm a Stranger Here Myself: Notes on Returning to America After 20 Years Away

“People are so addicted to convenience that they have become trapped in a vicious circle: The more labor-saving appliances they acquire, the harder they need to work; the harder they
work, the more labor-saving appliances they feel they need to acquire.”
― Bill Bryson, I'm a Stranger Here Myself: Notes on Returning to America After Twenty Years Away

“For a long time it puzzled me how something so expensive, so leading edge, could be so useless, and then it occurred to me that a computer is a stupid machine with the ability to do incredibly smart things, while computer programmers are smart people with the ability to do incredibly stupid things. They are, in short, a perfect match.”
― Bill Bryson, I'm a Stranger Here Myself: Notes on Returning to America After Twenty Years Away

“Nobody deserves to go to the World Series more than the Chicago Cubs. But they can't go because that would spoil their custom of never going. It is an irreconcilable paradox.”
― Bill Bryson, I'm a Stranger Here Myself: Notes on Returning to America After Twenty Years Away

“Coming back to your native land after an absence of many years is a surprisingly unsettling business, a little like waking from a long coma. Time, you discover, has wrought changes that leave you feeling mildly foolish and out of touch.”
― Bill Bryson, I'm a Stranger Here Myself: Notes on Returning to America After 20 Years Away

“As the economist Herman Daly once put it: “The current national accounting system treats the earth as a business in liquidation.”
― Bill Bryson, I'm a Stranger Here Myself: Notes on Returning to America After 20 Years Away

“In Anglo-Saxon times, according to Crippen, it was customary for someone offering a drink to say, “Wassail!” and for the recipient to respond “Drinkhail!” and for the participants to repeat the exercise until comfortably horizontal.”
― Bill Bryson, I'm a Stranger Here Myself: Notes on Returning to America After 20 Years Away

“I am assured that this is a true story. A man calls up his computer helpline complaining that the cupholder on his personal computer has snapped off, and he wants to know how to get it fixed. “Cupholder?” says the computer helpline person, puzzled. “I’m sorry, sir, but I’m confused. Did you buy this cupholder at a computer show or receive it as a special promotion?” “No, it came as part of the standard equipment on my computer.” “But our computers don’t come with cupholders.” “Well, pardon me, friend, but they do,” says the man a little hotly. “I’m looking at mine right now. You push a button on the base of the unit and it slides right out.” The man, it transpired, had been using the CD drawer on his computer to hold his coffee cup. I bring this up here by way of introducing our topic this week: cupholders. Cupholders are taking over the world. It would be almost impossible to exaggerate the importance of cupholders in automotive circles these days. The New York Times recently ran a long article in which it tested a dozen family cars. It rated each of them for ten important features, among them engine size, trunk space, handling, quality of suspension, and, yes, number of cupholders. A car dealer acquaintance of ours tells us that they are one of the first things people remark on, ask about, or play with when they come to look at a car. People buy cars on the basis of cupholders. Nearly all car advertisements note the number of cupholders prominently in the text. Some cars, like the newest model of the Dodge Caravan, come with as many as seventeen cupholders. The largest Caravan holds seven passengers. Now you don’t have to be a nuclear physicist, or even wide awake, to work out that that is 2.43 cupholders per passenger. Why, you may reasonably wonder, would each passenger in a vehicle need 2.43 cupholders? Good question. Americans, it is true, consume positively staggering volumes of fluids. One of our local gas stations, I am reliably informed, sells a flavored confection called a Slurpee in containers up to 60 ounces in size. But even if every member of the family had a Slurpee and a personal bottle of”
― Bill Bryson, I'm a Stranger Here Myself: Notes on Returning to America After 20 Years Away

“There were 212 people in Stockholm named Erik Eriksson, 117 named Sven Svensson, 126 named Nils Nilsson, and 259 named Lars Larsson”
― Bill Bryson, I'm a Stranger Here Myself: Notes on Returning to America After 20 Years Away

“To an American shopper there are just three spans of time: now, tomorrow at the very latest, and we’ll look elsewhere.”
― Bill Bryson, I'm a Stranger Here Myself: Notes on Returning to America After 20 Years Away

“On this trip as we drove across Pennsylvania, a state so ludicrously vast that it takes a whole day to traverse,”
― Bill Bryson, I'm a Stranger Here Myself: Notes on Returning to America After 20 Years Away

“What was overlooked in all this was how microscopically small the risk from passive smoking actually is. A rate of 1 in 30,000 sounds reasonably severe, but it doesn’t actually amount to much. Eating one pork chop a week is statistically more likely to give you cancer than sitting routinely in a roomful of smokers.”
― Bill Bryson, I'm a Stranger Here Myself: Notes on Returning to America After 20 Years Away