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Book: Neither Here Nor There: Travels in Europe
Quotes of Book: Neither Here Nor There:
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  1. Bill Bryson _ Neither Here Nor There:

    noticed on my city map that just up the road was the Musée International de la Croix-Rouge et du Croissant-Rouge {the International Museum of the Red Cross and Red Breakfast Roll}, which sounded much more promising to me.
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  2. Bill Bryson _ Neither Here Nor There:

    I took a big draft of my beer, warmed by my reminiscences, and quietly delighted at the thought that my schooldays were forever behind me, that never again for as long as I lived would I have to bevel an edge or elucidate the principles of the Volstead Act in not less than 250 words or give even a mouse-sized shit about which far-flung countries produce jute and what they do with it. It is a thought that never fails to cheer me. In
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  3. Bill Bryson _ Neither Here Nor There:

    I took off my boot and sock and examined my ankle, expecting-and indeed, in that perverse manner of the injured male, rather hoping-to find some splintered bone straining at the skin like a tent pole, making everyone who saw it queasy. But the ankle was just faintly bluish and tender and very slightly swollen, and I realized that once more in my life I had merely achieved acute pain and not the sort of grotesque injury that would lead to a mercy flight by helicopter and a fussing-over by young nurses in erotically starched uniforms.
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  4. Bill Bryson _ Neither Here Nor There:

    the only English-language publication on offer was the weekend edition of USA Today, a publication that always puts me in mind of a newspaper we used to get in grade school called My Weekly Reader. I am amazed enough that they can find buyers for USA Today in the U.S.A., but the possibility that anyone would ever present himself at the station kiosk in Buchs, Switzerland, and ask for it seemed to me to set a serious challenge to the laws of probability.
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  5. Bill Bryson _ Neither Here Nor There:

    All the light switches in the hallways were timed to go off after ten or fifteen seconds, presumably as an economy measure. This wasn't so bad if your room was next to the elevator, but if it was very far down the hall, and hotel hallways in Paris tend to wander around like an old man with Alzheimer's, you would generally proceed the last furlong in total blackness, feeling your way along the walls with flattened palms, and invariably colliding scrotally with the corner of a nineteenth-century oak table put there, evidently, for that purpose.
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  6. Bill Bryson _ Neither Here Nor There:

    Romans park their cars the way I would park if I had just spilled a beaker of hydrochloric acid on my lap.
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  7. Bill Bryson _ Neither Here Nor There:

    When at last a cab arrived and pulled up directly in front of me, I was astonished to discover that seventeen grown men and women believed they had a perfect right to try to get in ahead of me. A middle-aged man in a cashmere coat who was obviously wealthy and well-educated actually laid hands on me. I maintained possession by making a series of aggrieved Gallic honking noises-"Mais, non! Mais, non!"-and using my bulk to block the door. I leaped in, resisting the chance to catch the pushy man's tie in the door and let him trot along with us to the Gare du Nord, and told the driver to get me the hell out of there. He looked at me as if I were a large, imperfectly formed turd, and with a disgusted sigh engaged first gear.
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  8. Bill Bryson _ Neither Here Nor There:

    wanted to be puzzled and charmed, to experience the endless, beguiling variety of a continent where you can board a train and an hour later be somewhere where the inhabitants speak a different language, eat different foods, work different hours, live lives that are at once so different and yet so oddly similar. I wanted to be a tourist. But"
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