# Quote — Bill Bryson, The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid

> Making models was reputed to be hugely enjoyable... But when you got the kit home and opened the box the contents turned out to be of a uniform leaden gray or olive green, consisting of perhaps sixty thousand tiny parts, some no larger than a proton, all attached in some organic, inseparable way to plastic stalks like swizzle sticks. The tubes of glue by contrast were the size of large pastry tubes. No matter how gently you depressed them they would blurp out a pint or so of a clear viscous goo whose one instinct was to attach itself to some foreign object—a human finger, the living-room drapes, the fur of a passing animal—and become an infinitely long string. Any attempt to break the string resulted in the creation of more strings. Within moments you would be attached to hundreds of sagging strands, all connected to something that had nothing to do with model airplanes or World War II. The only thing the glue wouldn’t stick to, interestingly, was a piece of plastic model; then it just became a slippery lubricant that allowed any two pieces of model to glide endlessly over each other, never drying. The upshot was that after about forty minutes of intensive but troubled endeavor you and your immediate surroundings were covered in a glistening spiderweb of glue at the heart of which was a gray fuselage with one wing on upside down and a pilot accidentally but irremediably attached by his flying cap to the cockpit ceiling. Happily by this point you were so high on the glue that you didn’t give a shit about the pilot, the model, or anything else.

- Author: [Bill Bryson](https://www.leafyquotes.com/bill-bryson.md)
- Book: [The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid](https://www.leafyquotes.com/bill-bryson/the-life-and-times-of-the-thunderbolt-kid.md)
- Page: 81
- Source: [Wikiquote](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Bill_Bryson#The_Life_And_Times_of_the_Thunderbolt_Kid_(2006)) ([CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/))
- Quote page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/bill-bryson/the-life-and-times-of-the-thunderbolt-kid/making-models-was

## More from this book

> He hit the water—impacted really is the word for it—at over six hundred miles an hour, with a report so loud that it made birds fly out of trees up to three miles away. At such a speed water effectively becomes a solid. I don’t believe Mr. Milton penetrated it at all, but just bounced off it about fifteen feet, limbs suddenly very loose, and then lay on top of it, still, like an autumn leaf, spinning gently.

p. 78 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/bill-bryson/the-life-and-times-of-the-thunderbolt-kid/he-hit-the.md)

> Nearly a quarter of American men were in the Armed forces [in 1968]. The rest were in school, in prison, or were George W. Bush.

p. 193 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/bill-bryson/the-life-and-times-of-the-thunderbolt-kid/nearly-a-quarter.md)

> The makers of sneakers also thoughtfully pocked the soles with numberless crevices, craters, chevrons, mazes, crop circles, and other rubbery hieroglyphs, so that when you stepped in a moist pile of dog shit, as you most assuredly did within three bounds of leaving the house, they provided additional absorbing hours of pastime while you cleaned them out with a stick, gagging quietly but oddly content.

p. 34 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/bill-bryson/the-life-and-times-of-the-thunderbolt-kid/the-makers-of-sneakers.md)