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

> So to sleep on the sleeping porch required preparation. First, you put on long underwear, pajamas, jeans, a sweatshirt, your grandfather’s old cardigan and bathrobe, two pairs of woolen socks on your feet and another on your hands, and a hat with earflaps tied beneath the chin.Then you climbed into bed and were immediately covered with a dozen bed blankets, three horse blankets, all the household overcoats, a canvas tarpaulin, and a piece of old carpet. I’m not sure that they didn’t lay an old wardrobe on top of that, just to hold everything down. It was like sleeping under a dead horse. For the first minute or so it was unimaginably cold, shockingly cold, but gradually your body heat seeped in and you became warm and happy in a way you would not have believed possible only a minute or two before. It was bliss. Or at least it was until you moved a muscle. The warmth, you discovered, extended only to the edge of your skin and not a micron farther. There wasn’t any possibility of shifting positions. If you so much as flexed a finger or bent a knee, it was like plunging them into liquid nitrogen.

- 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: 140
- 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/so-to-sleep

## 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)