Laurie Wright > Laurie's Quotes

“The people are immensely likable— cheerful, extrovert, quick-witted, and unfailingly obliging. Their cities are safe and clean and nearly always built on water. They have a society that is prosperous, well ordered, and instinctively egalitarian. The food is excellent. The beer is cold. The sun nearly always shines. There is coffee on every corner. Life doesn't get much better than this.”
― Bill Bryson, In a Sunburned Country

“As the saying goes, it takes all kinds to make the world go around, though perhaps some shouldn't go quite so far around it as others.”
― Bill Bryson, In a Sunburned Country

“It is not true that the English invented cricket as a way of making all other human endeavors look interesting and lively; that was merely an unintended side effect. ...It is the only sport that incorporates meal breaks. It is the only sport that shares its name with an insect. It is the only sport in which spectators burn as many calories as the players-more if they are moderately restless.”
― Bill Bryson, In a Sunburned Country

“Australians are very unfair in this way. They spend half of any conversation insisting that the country's dangers are vastly overrated and that there's nothing to worry about, and the other half telling you how six months ago their Uncle Bob was driving to Mudgee when a tiger snake slid out from under the dashboard and bit him on the groin, but that it's okay now because he's off the life support machine and they've discovered he can communicate with eye blinks.”
― Bill Bryson, In a Sunburned Country

“[Australia] is the home of the largest living thing on earth, the Great Barrier Reef, and of the largest monolith, Ayers Rock (or Uluru to use its now-official, more respectful Aboriginal name). It has more things that will kill you than anywhere else. Of the world's ten most poisonous snakes, all are Australian. Five of its creatures - the funnel web spider, box jellyfish, blue-ringed octopus, paralysis tick, and stonefish - are the most lethal of their type in the world. This is a country where even the fluffiest of caterpillars can lay you out with a toxic nip, where seashells will not just sting you but actually sometimes go for you. ... If you are not stung or pronged to death in some unexpected manner, you may be fatally chomped by sharks or crocodiles, or carried helplessly out to sea by irresistible currents, or left to stagger to an unhappy death in the baking outback. It's a tough place.”
― Bill Bryson, In a Sunburned Country

“I'm quite certain that if the rest of the world vanished overnight and the development of cricket were left in Australian hands, within a generation, the players would be wearing shorts and using the bats to hit each other, and the thing is, it'd be a much better game for it.”
― Bill Bryson, In a Sunburned Country

“But don't worry," she continued. "Most snakes don't want to hurt you. If you're out in the bush and a snake comes along, just stop dead and let it slide over your shoes."
This, I decided, was the least-likely-to-be-followed advice I have ever been given.”
― Bill Bryson, In a Sunburned Country

“[About Uluru] I'm suggesting nothing here, but I will say that if you were an intergalactic traveler who had broken down in our solar system, the obvious directions to rescuers would be: "Go to the third planet and fly around till you see the big red rock. You can't miss it." If ever on earth they dig up a 150,000-year-old rocket ship from the galaxy Zog, this is where it will be. I'm not saying I expect it to happen; not saying that at all. I'm just observing that if I were looking for an ancient starship this is where I would start digging.”
― Bill Bryson, In a Sunburned Country

“In the morning a new man was behind the front desk. "And how did you enjoy your stay, Sir?" he asked smoothly.
"It was singularly execrable," I replied.
"Oh, excellent," he purred, taking my card
"In fact, I would go so far as to say that the principal value of a stay in this establishment is that it is bound to make all subsequent service-related experiences seem, in comparison, refreshing."
He made a deeply appreciative expression as if to say, "Praise indeed," and presnted my bill for signature. "Well, we hope you'll come again."
"I would sooner have bowel surgery in the woods with a a stick."
His expression wavered, then held there for a long moment. "Excellent," he said again, but without a great show of conviction.”
― Bill Bryson, In a Sunburned Country

“Perhaps it’s my natural pessimism, but it seems that an awfully large part of travel these days is to see things while you still can.”
― Bill Bryson, In a Sunburned Country

“Suddenly we were in Hawaii—tropical mountains running down to sparkling seas, sweeping bays, flawless beaches guarded by listing palms, little green and rocky islands standing off the headlands. From time to time we drove through sunny canefields, overlooked by the steep, blue eminence of the Great Dividing Range.”
― Bill Bryson, In a Sunburned Country

“Remembrance of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were.”
― Marcel Proust

“It was cold and barren. It was no longer the view that I remembered. The sunshine of her presence was far from me. The charm of her voice no longer murmured in my ear.”
― Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White

“He remembered a version of himself untrammeled by expectation, unimpeded by Ego. He had suffered in the many years since then, seeking to return to that original self, if, in fact, it ever existed. And yet, he was helpless but to regard that unmistakable fear that gripped him in his dream as a sign that his unevenness lent him now to utter incongruity with this specter of past.”
― Ashim Shanker, Sinew of the Social Species

“Was it possible to feel nostalgic about something that had never happened to him, possible for nostalgia to be taken in by the body as a free pathogen to infect the consciousness with stray sentiments? Perhaps, in his dreams, he had traveled back in time, or even drifted into another dimension of space-time and inhabited the body, experiences, and nostalgia of another. To even envisage so allowed the trauma of those lost moments, though not his own, to draw from him a certain envy for the entity in whose memories he had basked vicariously. . .Perhaps, nostalgia was a microorganism. . .the bacterium that infected. . . Yes. . .maybe he was sick.”
― Ashim Shanker, Only the Deplorable

“And once the novelist has brought us to this state, in which, as in all purely mental states, every emotion is multiplied ten-fold, into which his book comes disturb us as might a dream, but a dream more lucid and more abiding than those that come to us in sleep, why then, for the space of an hour he sets free within us all the joys and sorrows in the world.”
― Marcel Proust

“Anyone who's read all of Proust plus The Man withour Qualities is bound t be missing out on a few other titles.”
― Lorrie Moore, A Gate at the Stairs

“You should write because you love the shape of stories and sentences and the creation of different words on a page. Writing comes from reading, and reading is the finest teacher of how to write.”
― Annie Proulx

“Government observers, keen on getting the Penan out of the valuable hardwood forests, have claimed that Penan health is poor and that they are malnourished. This is a ploy to get them settled so they can be controlled. Also, it is a source of embarrassment to the governments of Malaysia and Indonesia that in the 1980s, nomadic hunters are still roaming the jungles. This doesn't help the national image of a modern, developing country.”
― Eric Hansen, Stranger in the Forest: On Foot Across Borneo

“don't want to give the impression that perfectly normal, healthy, thoughtful, and balanced people are not drawn to orchids. I am told they exist. I just didn't have much luck finding them”
― Eric Hansen, Orchid Fever: A Horticultural Tale of Love, Lust, and Lunacy

“Considering our backgrounds, I found it a strange irony that Ian and I should meet in central Borneo. Both of us were set in motion by the war in Southeast Asia. Ian enlisted. I left the country several weeks before an FBI agent arrived at my parents' front door.”
― Eric Hansen, Stranger in the Forest: On Foot Across Borneo

“Eyes glazed over as the great rice-wine parties in the highlands were recalled, parties that are no longer held since the arrival of the mission. Bario has become a good, clean, upstanding, sober, hard-working Christian community. What a loss for these fun-loving and generous people.”
― Eric Hansen, Stranger in the Forest: On Foot Across Borneo

“Anyone who thinks sitting in church can make you a Christian must also think that sitting in a garage can make you a car.”
― Garrison Keillor

“Cats are intended to teach us that not everything in nature has a purpose.”
― Garrison Keillor

“Librarians, Dusty, possess a vast store of politeness. These are people who get asked regularly the dumbest questions on God's green earth. These people tolerate every kind of crank and eccentric and mouth breather there is.”
― Garrison Keillor, Dusty And Lefty: The Lives of the Cowboys

“My generation was secretive, brooding, ambitious, show-offy, and this generation is congenial. Totally. I imagine them walking around with GPS chips that notify them when a friend is in the vicinity, and their GPSes guide them to each other in clipped electronic lady voices and they sit down side by side in a coffee shop and text-message each other while checking their e-mail and hopping and skipping around Facebook to see who has posted pictures of their weekend.”
― Garrison Keillor

“Judge nothing, you will be happy. Forgive everything, you will be happier. Love everything, you will be happiest.”
― Sri Chinmoy

“Your brain is doing some great work when it's laughing.”
― Jon Scieszka, Funny Business

“Oh no, she was never elitist. She said that far too many women are the accomplices of cruel, indifferent men. They lie for these men. They lie to their own children. Because their fathers treated them exactly the same way. These women always retain some hope that love is hiding behind the cruelty, so that the anguish doesn't drive them mad. Truth is, though, Max, there's no love there.
Max wiped a tear from the corner of his eye.”
― Nina George, The Little Paris Bookshop

“Nujood's rebellion, honorable in our eyes, is moreover considered by conservatives as an outrageous affront, punishable, according to extremist, by a murderous "honor crime.".”
― Nujood Ali, I Am Nujood, Age 10 and Divorced