Bill Bryson Quotes

“Life takes on a neat simplicity, too. Time ceases to have any meaning. When it is dark, you go to bed, and when it is light again you get up, and everything in between is just in between. It’s quite wonderful, really.”

“I wanted to quit and to do this forever, sleep in a bed and in a tent, see what was over the next hill and never see a hill again. All of this all at once, every moment, on the trail or off.”

“What on earth would I do if four bears came into my camp? Why, I would die of course. Literally shit myself lifeless.”

“To tell you the truth, I’m amazed we’ve come this far,” he said, and I agreed. We had hiked 500 miles, a million and a quarter steps, since setting off from Amicalola. We had grounds to be proud. We were real hikers now. We had shit in the woods and slept with bears. We had become, we would forever be, mountain men.”

“If there’s one thing the AT teaches, it is low-level ecstasy-something we could all do with more of in our lives.”

“Hunters will tell you that a moose is a wily and ferocious forest creature. Nonsense. A moose is a cow drawn by a three-year-old.”

“Most of the time I am sunk in thought, but at some point on each walk there comes a moment when I look up and notice, with a kind of first-time astonishment, the amazing complex delicacy of the words, the casual ease with which elemental things come together to form a composition that is-whatever the season, wherever I put my besotted gaze-perfect.”

“Black bears rarely attack. But here’s the thing. Sometimes they do. All bears are agile, cunning and immensely strong, and they are always hungry. If they want to kill you and eat you, they can, and pretty much whenever they want. That doesn’t happen often, but-and here is the absolutely salient point-once would be enough.”

“A significant fraction of thru-hikers reach Katahdin, then turn around and start back to Georgia. They just can’t stop walking, which kind of makes you wonder.”

“Compared with most other places in the developed world, America is still to a remarkable extent a land of forests. One-third o the landscape of the lower forty-eight states is covered in trees. ”

“Woods are not like other spaces... They make you feel small.. like a small child lost in a crowd of strange legs. Stand in a desert or prairie and you know you are in a big space. Stand in a woods and you only sense it. They are a vast featureless nowhere. And they are alive.”

“I hate all the technology on the trail. Some AT hikers... carry laptop computers and modems, so they can file daily reports to their family and friends.”

“That stick [...] had become all but part of me. It was a link with my children, whom I missed more than I can tell you. I felt like weeping.”

“Sometimes he would be proudly bearing my stick, which I had left by a tree when I had stopped to tie my laces or adjust my pack.”

“I watched him go, looking old and tired, and wondered for a minute what on earth we were doing up here. We weren’t boys anymore.”

“Distance changes utterly when you take the world on foot. A mile becomes a long way [...] fifty miles at the very limits of conception. ”

“All over America today people would be dragging themselves to work, stuck in traffic jams, wreathed in exhaust smoke. I was going for a walk in the woods. ”

“Now here’s a thought to consider. Every twenty minutes on the Appalachian Trail, Katz and I walked farther than the average American walks in a week. ”