Bill Bryson Quotes

We forget just how painfully dim the world was before electricity. A candle, a good candle, provides barely a hundredth of the illumination of a single 100 watt light bulb.

The world at night, for much of history, was a very dark place indeed.

Do you realize if it weren't for Edison we'd be watching TV by candlelight?

We owe a lot to Thomas Edison - if it wasn't for him, we'd be watching television by candlelight.

A day without sunshine is like, you know, night.

Most of us, myself included, have forgotten what real darkness is like. We live in a world where light is inescapable. It comes from street lamps, headlights, security floodlights, and even the faint glow of our alarm clocks.

Life without power is death.

The click [of a light switch] is the modern triumphal clarion proceeding us through life, announcing our entry into every lightless room.

At night a candle's brighter than the sun

Its so real out here right now, the only reason why you see anything is cuz I got the flash on.

We of the age of the machines, having delivered ourselves of nocturnal enemies, now have a dislike of night itself. With lights and ever more lights, we drive the holiness and beauty of night back to the forests and the sea.

The skylines lit up at dead of night, the air-conditioning systems cooling empty hotels in the desert and artificial light in the middle of the day all have something both demented and admirable about them. The mindless luxury of a rich civilization, and yet of a civilization perhaps as scared to see the lights go out as was the hunter in his primitive night.

...know you not that you are my sun by day, and my star by night? By my faith! I was in deepest darkness till you appeared and illuminated all.

I'm not a creature of the night, mate.

Time moves in it special way in the middle of the night.

The night has a capacity for terror that the day can never match.

Amplified by the still of night, the book opened -- a gust of wind.

Outside is dark. The kitchen light is loud. It deafens me as I walk towards it.

I got a statistic for you right now. Grab your pencil, Doug. There are five billion trees in the world. I looked it up. Under every tree is a shadow, right? So, then, what makes night? I'll tell you: shadows crawling out from under five billion trees! Think of it! Shadows running around in the air, muddying the waters you might say. If only we could figure a way to keep those darn five billion shadows under those trees, we could stay up half the night, Doug, because there'd be no night!

To-night when the full-bellied moon swallows the stars. Grant that I know.

Tis now the very witching time of night, when churchyards yawn and hell itself breathes out Contagion to this world.

The first thing he noticed was how quiet it was. This was nothing like the kind of quiet he heard when he woke up in the middle of the night after a bad dream. When that happened, there were always strange, unidentifiable sounds seeping into his room from the tiny gaps where the windowpanes weren't sealed together correctly. At those moments he could always tell there was life outside, even if all that life was fast asleep. It was a silence that wasn't silence at all.

There was no wind; there was no passing shadow on the deep shade of the night; there was no noise. The city lay behind him, lighted here and there, and starry worlds were hidden by the masonry of spire and roof that hardly made out any shapes against the sky. Dark and lonely distance lay around him everywhere, and the clocks were faintly striking two.

Once upon a midnight dreary

Many men walk by day; few walk by night. It is a different season.