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In a Sunburned Country QUOTES

In a Sunburned Country QUOTES

1 " She was torn between her customer service training and her youthful certitude. "

― Bill Bryson , In a Sunburned Country

2 " He left to do whatever editors do. "

― Bill Bryson , In a Sunburned Country

3 " The thing about Ayers Rock is that by the time you finally get there you are already a little sick of it. "

― Bill Bryson , In a Sunburned Country

4 " 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

5 " It was so bad, it was worth more than we paid. "

― Bill Bryson , In a Sunburned Country

6 " Describing his experience with the sting of an extremely toxic jellyfish, he did something you don't often see a scientist do: he shivered. "

― Bill Bryson , In a Sunburned Country

7 " You are totally at the mercy of nature in this country, mate. It's just a fact of life. "

― Bill Bryson , In a Sunburned Country

8 " A man arriving for the Grand Final in Melbourne is surprised to find the seat beside his empty. Tickets for the Grand Final are sold out weeks in advance and empty seats unknown. So he says to the man on the other side of the seat: ‘Excuse me, do you know why there is no one in this seat?’ ‘It was my wife’s,’ answers the second man, a touch wistfully, ‘but I’m afraid she died.’ ‘Oh, that’s terrible. I’m so sorry.’ ‘Yes, she never missed a match.’ ‘But couldn’t you have given the ticket to a friend or relative?’ ‘Oh no. They’re all at the funeral. "

― Bill Bryson , In a Sunburned Country

9 " Put in the crudest terms, Australia was slightly more important to us in 1997 than bananas, but not nearly as important as ice cream. "

― Bill Bryson , In a Sunburned Country

10 " By the late eighteenth century Britain’s statute books were plump with capital offences; you could be hanged for any of 200 acts, including, notably, ‘impersonating an Egyptian’. "

― Bill Bryson , In a Sunburned Country

11 " That’s the thing about Australia, you see. It teems with interesting stuff, but at the same time it’s so vast and empty and forbidding that it generally takes a remarkable stroke of luck to find it. Unfortunately, "

― Bill Bryson , In a Sunburned Country

12 " Cook was a brilliant navigator and a conscientious observer, but he made one critical mistake on his first voyage: he took Australia’s wet season for its dry one, and concluded that the country was more hospitable than it was. "

― Bill Bryson , In a Sunburned Country

13 " I am quite certain that if the rest of the world vanished overnight and the development of cricket was left in Australian hands, within a generation the players would be wearing shorts and using the bats to hit each other. "

― Bill Bryson , In a Sunburned Country

14 " In 1935, not far from where we stood now, some fishermen captured a fourteen-foot beige shark and took it to a public aquarium at Coogee, where it was put on display. The shark swam around for a day or two in its new home, then abruptly, and to the certain surprise of the viewing public, regurgitated a human arm. "

― Bill Bryson , In a Sunburned Country

15 " The friendliness of Australians – all of it quite sincere and spontaneous, as far as I could ever tell – never ceases to amaze or gratify. "

― Bill Bryson , In a Sunburned Country

16 " In late 1998, the inhabitants were invited to become Australia’s seventh state and roundly rejected the notion in a referendum. It appears they quite like being outsiders. In consequence, an area of 523,000 square miles, or about one-fifth of the country, is in Australia but not entirely of it. This throws up some interesting anomalies. All Australians are required by law to vote in federal elections, including residents of the Northern Territory. However, since the Northern Territory is not a state, it has no seats in Parliament. So the Territorians elect representatives who go to Canberra and attend sessions of Parliament (at least that’s what they say in their letters home) but don’t actually vote or take part or have any consequence at all. Even more interestingly, during national referendums the citizens of the Northern Territory are also required to vote, but the votes don’t actually count towards anything. They’re just put in a drawer or something. Seems a little odd to me, but then, as I say, the people seem content with the arrangement. Personally, "

― Bill Bryson , In a Sunburned Country

17 " One thing you won’t find much in Australian second-hand bookshops are 1950s or earlier editions of lots of books – The Catcher in the Rye, A Farewell to Arms, Animal Farm, Peyton Place, Another Country, Brave New World and hundreds and hundreds of others. The reason for this is simple: they were banned. Altogether, at its peak, 5,000 titles were forbidden to be imported into the country. By the 1950s this had fallen to a couple of hundred, but it still featured some extraordinary exclusions – Childbirth Without Pain, for instance, whose unflinching candour in describing where babies come from was considered a little too rich for Australian sensibilities. This was just conventional titles, by the way. "

― Bill Bryson , In a Sunburned Country

18 " Flies are of course always irksome, but the Australian variety distinguishes itself with its very particular persistence. If an Australian fly wants to be up your nose or in your ear, there is no discouraging him. Flick at him as you will and each time he will jump out of range and come straight back. It is simply not possible to deter him. "

― Bill Bryson , In a Sunburned Country

19 " The white people never looked at the Aborigines, and the Aborigines never looked at the white people. The two races seemed to inhabit separate but parallel universes. I felt as if I was the only person who could see both groups at once. "

― Bill Bryson , In a Sunburned Country

20 " In 1606, a Spanish mariner named Luis Vaez de Torres sailed across the Pacific from South America and straight into the narrow channel (now called the Torres Strait) that separates Australia from New Guinea without having the faintest idea that he had just done the nautical equivalent of threading a needle. "

― Bill Bryson , In a Sunburned Country