A Walk in the Woods, a best-selling book by Bill Bryson, is a lighthearted description of Bryson’s failed effort to trek the Appalachian Trail.
Anyone who appreciates hiking, wildlife, or comedy will enjoy “A Walk in the Woods.”
Here are some of the top quotes from “A Walk in the Woods” book by Bill Bryson.
Best A Walk in the Woods Quotes
Goodness knows what the world is coming to when park rangers carry service revolvers. ~ Bill Bryson (A Walk in the Woods).
There is no point in hurrying because you are not actually going anywhere. However far or long you plod, you are always in the same place: in the woods. ~ Bill Bryson (A Walk in the Woods).
We had remained friends in a kind of theoretical sense, but our paths had diverged wildly. ~ Bill Bryson (A Walk in the Woods).
Salamanders are interesting, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. ~ Bill Bryson (A Walk in the Woods).
The hardest part was coming to terms with the constant dispiriting discovery that there is always more hill. ~ Bill Bryson (A Walk in the Woods).
Lots of people leave Pennsylvania limping and bruised. The state also has what are reputed to be the meanest rattlesnakes anywhere along the trail. ~ Bill Bryson (A Walk in the Woods).
Now here’s a thought to consider. Every twenty minutes on the Appalachian Trail, Katz and I walked farther than the average American walks in a week. ~ Bill Bryson (A Walk in the Woods).
The National Park Service actually has something of a tradition of making things extinct. ~ Bill Bryson (A Walk in the Woods).
Four times I was honked at for having the temerity to proceed through town without the benefit of metal. ~ Bill Bryson (A Walk in the Woods).
What on earth would I do if four bears came into my camp? Why, I would die of course. Literally shit myself lifeless. ~ Bill Bryson (A Walk in the Woods).
On average the total walking of an American these days – that’s walking of all types: from car to office, from office to car, around the supermarket and shopping malls – adds up to 1.4 miles a week, barely 350 yards a day. ~ Bill Bryson (A Walk in the Woods).
When simple plants colonized the land and the first creatures crawled gasping from the sea, the Appalachians were there to greet them. ~ Bill Bryson (A Walk in the Woods).
The Forest Service is truly an extraordinary institution. A lot of people, seeing that word forest in the title, assume it has something to do with looking after trees. In fact, no – though that was the original plan. ~ Bill Bryson (A Walk in the Woods).
I wanted a little of that swagger that comes with being able to gaze at the horizon through eyes of chipped granite and say with a slow, manly sniff, ‘Yeah, I’ve shit in the woods. ~ Bill Bryson (A Walk in the Woods).
I hate all the technology on the trail. Some AT hikers… carry laptop computers and modems, so they can file daily reports to their family and friends. ~ Bill Bryson (A Walk in the Woods).
Black bears rarely attack. But here’s the thing. Sometimes they do. All bears are agile, cunning and immensely strong, and they are always hungry. If they want to kill you and eat you, they can, and pretty much whenever they want. That doesn’t happen often, but-and here is the absolutely salient point-once would be enough. ~ Bill Bryson (A Walk in the Woods).
Top A Walk in the Woods Quotes
Shenandoah National Park is lovely. It is possibly the most wonderful national park I have ever been in, and, considering the impossible and conflicting demands put on it, it is extremely well run. Almost at once it became my favorite part of the Appalachian Trail. ~ Bill Bryson (A Walk in the Woods).
Just passing through a door, being inside, surrounded by walls and a ceiling, was novel. ~ Bill Bryson (A Walk in the Woods).
Compared with most other places in the developed world, America is still to a remarkable extent a land of forests. One-third of the landscape of the lower forty-eight states is covered in trees. ~ Bill Bryson (A Walk in the Woods).
Famous A Walk in the Woods Quotes
When I awoke it was daylight. The inside of my tent was coated in a curious flaky rime, which I realized after a moment was all of my nighttime snores, condensed and frozen and pasted to the fabric, as if into a scrapbook of respiratory memories. ~ Bill Bryson (A Walk in the Woods).
That stick […] had become all but part of me. It was a link with my children, whom I missed more than I can tell you. I felt like weeping. ~ Bill Bryson (A Walk in the Woods).
When Americans load up their cars and drive enormous distances to a setting of rare natural splendor what most of them want then they get there is to play a little miniature golf and eat dribbly food. ~ Bill Bryson (A Walk in the Woods).
Sometimes he would be proudly bearing my stick, which I had left by a tree when I had stopped to tie my laces or adjust my pack. ~ Bill Bryson (A Walk in the Woods).
I turned to my own bunk and examined it with a kind of appalled fascination. If the mattress stains were anything to go by, a previous user had not so much suffered from incontinence as rejoiced in it. He had evidently included the pillow in his celebrations. ~ Bill Bryson (A Walk in the Woods).
However tall it grows, a tree is just a few pounds of living cells thinly spread between roots and leaves. ~ Bill Bryson (A Walk in the Woods).
A significant fraction of thru-hikers reach Katahdin, then turn around and start back to Georgia. They just can’t stop walking, which kind of makes you wonder. ~ Bill Bryson (A Walk in the Woods).
Vermont is Volvos and antique shops and country inns with cutely contrived names like Quail Hollow Lodge and Fiddlehead Farm Inn. New Hampshire is guys in hunting caps and pickup trucks with license plates bearing the feisty slogan “Live Free or Die.” ~ Bill Bryson (A Walk in the Woods).
Popular A Walk in the Woods Quotes
I wanted to quit and to do this forever, sleep in a bed and in a tent, see what was over the next hill and never see a hill again. All of this all at once, every moment, on the trail or off. ~ Bill Bryson (A Walk in the Woods).
Distance changes utterly when you take the world on foot. A mile becomes a long way […] fifty miles at the very limits of conception. ~ Bill Bryson (A Walk in the Woods).
If there’s one thing the AT teaches, it is low-level ecstasy-something we could all do with more of in our lives. ~ Bill Bryson (A Walk in the Woods).
Woods are not like other spaces… They make you feel small.. like a small child lost in a crowd of strange legs. Stand in a desert or prairie and you know you are in a big space. Stand in a woods and you only sense it. They are a vast featureless nowhere. And they are alive. ~ Bill Bryson (A Walk in the Woods).
Talking equipment is one of those things you just have to do, like chatting to your mother’s friends in the supermarket. ~ Bill Bryson (A Walk in the Woods).
I have long known that it is part of God’s plan for me to spend a little time with each of the most stupid people on earth, and Mary Ellen was proof that even in the Appalachian woods I would not be spared. It became evident that she was a rarity. ~ Bill Bryson (A Walk in the Woods).
All that is required of you is a willingness to trudge. There is no point in hurrying because you are not actually going anywhere. However far or long you trod you are always in the same place – in the woods. It’s where you were yesterday, where you will be tomorrow. ~ Bill Bryson (A Walk in the Woods).
We’re going to be in the wilderness in three days. There won’t be doughnut stores. ~ Bill Bryson (A Walk in the Woods).
Great A Walk in the Woods Quotes
Hunters will tell you that a moose is a wily and ferocious forest creature. Nonsense. A moose is a cow drawn by a three-year-old. ~ Bill Bryson (A Walk in the Woods).
Nearly everyone I talked to had some gruesome story involving a guileless acquaintance who had gone off hiking the trail with high hopes and new boots and come stumbling back two days later with a bobcat attached to his head or dripping blood from an armless sleeve and whispering in a hoarse voice, “Bear!” before sinking into a troubled unconsciousness. ~ Bill Bryson (A Walk in the Woods).
The Appalachians are the home of one of the world’s great hardwood forests. ~ Bill Bryson (A Walk in the Woods).
All over America today people would be dragging themselves to work, stuck in traffic jams, wreathed in exhaust smoke. I was going for a walk in the woods. ~ Bill Bryson (A Walk in the Woods).
There are 378,000 miles of roads in America’s national forests. That may seem a meaningless figure, but look at it this way – it is eight times the total mileage of America’s interstate highway system. ~ Bill Bryson (A Walk in the Woods).
That’s the trouble with losing your mind; by the time it’s gone, it’s too late to get it back. ~ Bill Bryson (A Walk in the Woods).
Life takes on a neat simplicity, too. Time ceases to have any meaning. When it is dark, you go to bed, and when it is light again you get up, and everything in between is just in between. It’s quite wonderful, really. ~ Bill Bryson (A Walk in the Woods).
When you’re on the AT, the forest is your universe, infinite and entire. It is all you experience day after day. Eventually it is about all you can imagine. ~ Bill Bryson (A Walk in the Woods).
To tell you the truth, I’m amazed we’ve come this far, he said, and I agreed. We had hiked 500 miles, a million and a quarter steps, since setting off from Amicalola. We had grounds to be proud. We were real hikers now. We had shit in the woods and slept with bears. We had become, we would forever be, mountain men. ~ Bill Bryson (A Walk in the Woods).
Most of the time I am sunk in thought, but at some point on each walk there comes a moment when I look up and notice, with a kind of first-time astonishment, the amazing complex delicacy of the words, the casual ease with which elemental things come together to form a composition that is-whatever the season, wherever I put my besotted gaze-perfect. ~ Bill Bryson (A Walk in the Woods).
So these were the 47 top A Walk in the Woods quotes by Bill Bryson.
If you like these quotes and sayings, then you can also read my other articles on The Tao of Pooh book quotes and Politics by Aristotle book quotes.
