Bill Bryson Quotes

Des Moines is like your typical American city; it's just these concentric circles of malls, built outward from the city.

We are in danger of making our cities places where business goes on, but where life, in its real sense, is lost.

These days malls are the cathedrals of the modern world, and old buildings that had character are gone to allow for econo-worship and peso-pilgrimages.

I don't think malls are going to go away. People still need somewhere to go, but they do have to evolve.

There's nothing left of my hometown in Kentucky. All those small and mid-sized towns and cities in the U.S. are just about malls around the edges and suburbs. That was definitely a loss, because everything just gets homogenized. You can't tell where you are, it's all the same.

Anywhere you had a commerce center, you had a lot of music.

The market is good when the local people are in it and believe in it and support it. That's what I want.

We need to preserve our neighborhoods, our small business, our local economy.

Behind every small business, there's a story worth knowing. All the corner shops in our towns and cities, the restaurants, cleaners, gyms, hair salons, hardware stores - these didn't come out of nowhere.

Small businesses are the backbone of our economy.

Life in the mid-21st century is going to be about living locally. Be prepared to be good neighbors. Be prepared to find vocations that make you useful to your neighbors and to your fellow citizens.

The brutal reality is that newer, more sprawling suburbs - and especially the cheap boom-years exburbs - aren't just a bit unsustainable, they're ruinously unsustainable in almost every way, and nothing we know of will likely stop their decline, much less fix them easily.

The experience is fundamentally different for buying from local businesses than it is for buying consumer goods.

One out of every 100 families in Vermont was a part owner of Ben and Jerry's.

I represent a rural state and live in a small town. Small merchants make up the majority of Vermont's small businesses and thread our state together. It is the mom-and-pop grocers, farm-supply stores, coffee shops, bookstores and barber shops where Vermonters connect, conduct business and check in on one another.

The migration of the black middle class out of the cities in the wake of the civil rights movement and the deindustrialization of urban economies has left a corroded core, cut off from the social; mainstream and reliant on inadequate federal support.

Small business – the very fiber of our community life.

We have become too much a society of consumers rather than a society of citizens.

Not every town can or should be saved.

We will be all about the local, not the global.

The factories that moved overseas used to provide not just high-paying jobs but also a sense of purpose and community.

I haven't reported in grand detail on rituals of American life, road journeys or malls or the death of steel-manufacturing towns. I think this is because I feel a degree of alienation that I cannot combat.

For me, the high street is a key part of how we live, what sort of community we are, how we get our news, and how we get our gossip.

When we look at the investment decisions into the city of Compton, the small business community and global corporations and retailers and all of those types of services that decide to come into the community to serve it, they look at the perception, how does the brand work with the local community.

I think local shopping areas and markets are terribly important, both for tradespeople and the local feeling of an area.