Bill Bryson · 288 pages
Rating: (48.9K votes)
“I come from Des Moines. Somebody had to.”
― Bill Bryson, quote from The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid
“It was an especially wonderful time to be a noisy moron.”
― Bill Bryson, quote from The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid
“It’s a bit burned,” my mother would say apologetically at every meal, presenting you with a piece of meat that looked like something — a much-loved pet perhaps — salvaged from a tragic house fire. “But I think I scraped off most of the burned part,” she would add, overlooking that this included every bit of it that had once been flesh.
Happily, all this suited my father. His palate only responded to two tastes - burned and ice cream — so everything suited him so long as it was sufficiently dark and not too startlingly flavorful. Theirs truly was a marriage made in heaven, for no one could burn food like my mother or eat it like my dad.”
― Bill Bryson, quote from The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid
“I used to give X-ray vision a lot of thought because I couldn’t see how it could work. I mean, if you could see through people’s clothing, then surely you would also see through their skin and right into their bodies. You would see blood vessels, pulsing organs, food being digested and pushed through coils of bowel, and much else of a gross and undesirable nature. Even if you could somehow confine your X-rays to rosy epidermis, any body you gazed at wouldn’t be in an appealing natural state, but would be compressed and distorted by unseen foundation garments. The breasts, for one thing, would be oddly constrained and hefted, basketed within an unseen bra, rather than relaxed and nicely jiggly. It wouldn’t be satisfactory at all—or at least not nearly satisfactory enough. Which is why it was necessary to perfect ThunderVision™, a laserlike gaze that allowed me to strip away undergarments without damaging skin or outer clothing. That ThunderVision, stepped up a grade and focused more intensely, could also be used as a powerful weapon to vaporize irritating people was a pleasing but entirely incidental benefit.”
― Bill Bryson, quote from The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid
“They talk about big skies in the western United States, and they may indeed have them, but you have never seen such lofty clouds, such towering anvils, as in Iowa in July.”
― Bill Bryson, quote from The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid
“How do migrating birds know which one to follow? What if the lead bird just wants to be alone?”
― Bill Bryson, quote from The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid
“As a rule, you knew it was time to eat when you could hear potatoes exploding in the oven. Happily, all this suited my father. His palate only responded to two tastes - burned and ice cream - so everything suited him so long as it was sufficiently dark and not startlingly flavorful. Theirs truly was a marriage made in heaven, for no one could burn food like my mother or eat it like my Dad.”
― Bill Bryson, quote from The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid
“Imagine having a city full of things that no other city had.”
― Bill Bryson, quote from The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid
“They were Republicans, Nixon Republicans, and so didn't subscribe to the notion that laws are supposed to apply to all people equally.”
― Bill Bryson, quote from The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid
“IT WASN’T THAT MY MOTHER AND FATHER were indifferent to their children’s physical well-being by any means. It was just that they seemed to believe that everything would be fine in the end and they were always right.”
― Bill Bryson, quote from The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid
“It's hard for people now to remember just how enormous the world was back then for everybody, and how far away even fairly nearby places were. When we called my grandparents long distance on the telephone in Winfield, something we hardly ever did, it sounded as if they were speaking to us from a distant star. We had to shout to be heard and plug a finger in an ear to catch their faint, tinny voices in return. They were only about a hundred miles away, but that was a pretty considerable distance even well into the 1950s. Anything farther - beyond Chicago or Kansas City, say - quickly became almost foreign. It wasn't just that Iowa was far from everywhere. Everywhere was far from everywhere.”
― Bill Bryson, quote from The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid
“Mr. Schlubb, the pear-shaped PE teacher, sent us all out to run half a dozen laps around a preposterously enormous cinder track. For the Greenwood kids—all of us white, marshmallowy, innately unphysical, squinting unfamiliarly in the bright sunshine—it was a shock to the system of an unprecedented order.”
― Bill Bryson, quote from The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid
“canvas tarpaulin, and a piece of old carpet. I’m not sure that they didn’t lay an old wardrobe on top of that, just to”
― Bill Bryson, quote from The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid
“And when you got to the Trestle or the Vacant Lot or the Pond there would already be six hundred kids there. There were always six hundred kids everywhere except where two or more neighbourhoods met – at the Park, for instance – where the numbers would grow into the thousands. I once took part in an ice hockey game at the lagoon in Greenwood Park that involved four thousand kids, all slashing away violently with sticks, and went on for at least three quarters of an hour before anyone realized that we didn’t have a puck.”
― Bill Bryson, quote from The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid
Bill Bryson
Born place: in Des Moines, Polk County, Iowa, The United States
Born date December 8, 1951
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“Life was so much easier back when I was selfish.”
― R.C. Lewis, quote from Stitching Snow
“ninguna decisión tomada en medio de la noche suele ser acertada.”
― quote from Mondays with My Old Pastor: Sometimes All We Need Is a Reminder from Someone Who Has Walked Before Us
“Confronted with the problems that characterize our herding culture, we are perhaps like the metaphorical man wounded by an arrow that the Buddha discussed with his students. He said that the man would be foolish if he tried to discover who shot the arrow, why he shot it, where he was when he shot it, and so forth, before having the arrow removed and the wound treated, lest he bleed to death attempting to get his questions answered. We, likewise, can all remove the arrow and treat the wound of eating animal foods right now. We don't need to know the whole history. We can easily see it is cruel and that it is unnecessary; whatever people have done in the past, we are not obligated to imitate them if it is based on delusion. Perhaps in the past people thought they needed to enslave animals and people to survive, and that the cruelty involved in it was somehow allowed them. It's obviously not necessary for us today, as we can plainly see by walking into any grocery store, and the sooner we can awaken from the thrall of the obsolete mythos that we are predatory by nature, the sooner we'll be able to evolve spiritually and discover and fulfill our purpose on this earth.”
― Will Tuttle, quote from The World Peace Diet
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