Quotes from The Lost Continent: Travels in Small Town America

“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, quote from 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, quote from The 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, quote from 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, quote from 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, quote from The 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, quote from 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, quote from 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, quote from 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, quote from 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, quote from 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, quote from 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, quote from 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, quote from 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, quote from 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, quote from 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, quote from The Lost Continent: Travels in Small Town America

“They are taking away all the nice things there because they are impractical, as if that were reason enough – the red phone-boxes, the pound note, those open London buses that you can leap on and off. There is almost no experience in life that makes you look and feel more suave than jumping on or off a moving London bus. But they aren’t practical. They require two men (one to drive and one to stop thugs from kicking the crap out of the Pakistani gentleman at the back) and that is uneconomical, so they have to go. 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 centres 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, quote from 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. I”
― Bill Bryson, quote from 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, quote from 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, quote from 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, quote from The Lost Continent: Travels in Small Town America

“The people of Cody like you to think that Buffalo Bill was a native son. In fact, I’m awfully proud to tell you, he was an Iowa native, born in the little town of Le Claire in 1846. The people of Cody, in one of the more desperate commercial acts of this century, bought Buffalo Bill’s birthplace and re-erected it in their town, but they are lying through their teeth when they hint that he was a local. And the thing is, they have a talented native son of their own. Jackson Pollock, the artist, was born in Cody. But they don’t make anything of that because, I suppose, Pollock was a complete wanker when it came to shooting buffalo.”
― Bill Bryson, quote from The Lost Continent: Travels in Small Town America

“At the North Carolina border, the dull landscape ended abruptly, as if by decree. Suddenly the countryside rose and fell in majestic undulations, full of creeping thickets of laurel, rhododendron and palmetto.”
― Bill Bryson, quote from The Lost Continent: Travels in Small Town America

“...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, quote from The Lost Continent: Travels in Small Town America

About the author

Popular quotes

“... finally realizing that life was to be lived, rather than hoarded against an unseen tomorrow.”
― Robin Hobb, quote from Ship of Destiny

“...which seemed to hover in a limbo between creation and decay...”
― Thomas Mann, quote from Death in Venice

“Like everything was real, but nothing mattered.”
― V.E. Schwab, quote from Vicious

“Let's say you have an ax. Just a cheap one, from Home Depot. On one bitter winter day, you use said ax to behead a man. Don't worry, the man was already dead. Or maybe you should worry, because you're the one who shot him.”
― David Wong, quote from John Dies at the End

“Her books on alchemy were marvellous objects, every page a work of the engraver's art, but they nowhere contained instructions like "Be sure to open a window". They did have instructions like "Adde Aqua Quirmis to the Zinc untile Rising Gas Yse Vigorousky Evolved", but never added "Don't Doe Thys Atte Home" or even "And Say Fare-Thee-Welle to Thy Eyebrows.”
― Terry Pratchett, quote from Feet of Clay

Interesting books

About BookQuoters

BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.

We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.

Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.