To my mind, the greatest reward and luxury of travel is to be able to experience everyday things as if for the first time, to be in a position in which almost nothing is so familiar it is taken for granted.
BILL BRYSONWhen you tell an Iowan a joke, you can see a kind of race going on between his brain and his expression.
More Bill Bryson Quotes
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The remarkable position in which we find ourselves is that we don’t actually know what we actually know.
BILL BRYSON -
Physicists are atoms’ way of thinking about atoms.
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Because time moves more slowly in Kid World … it goes on for decades … It is adult life that is over in a twinkling.
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A third…candidate for Shakespearean authorship was Christopher Marlowe. He was the right age (just two months older than Shakespeare), had the requisite talent, and would certainly have had ample leisure after 1593, assuming he wasn’t too dead to work.
BILL BRYSON -
Americans now get in a car. 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.
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I understand cricket – what’s going on, the scoring – but I can’t understand why.
BILL BRYSON -
18th century scientists, the French in particular, seldom did things simply if an absurdly demanding alternative was available.
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I come from Des Moines. Someone had to.
BILL BRYSON -
Roads get wider and busier and less friendly to pedestrians. And all of the development based around cars, like big sprawling shopping malls.
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All the things that are part of your heritage make you British – that makes this country what it is. It’s part of your history. And here, unlike America, it’s still living history.
BILL BRYSON -
But what is life to a lichen ? Yet its impulse to exist, to be, is every bit as strong as ours arguably even stronger. If I were told that I had to spend decades being a furry growth on a rock in the woods, I believe I would lose the will to go on.
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You don’t need a science degree to understand about science. You just need to think about it.
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The great failure in education, much of the time, is the lack of excitement and stimulus
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But here’s an extrememly salient point: we have been chosen, by fate or Providence or whatever you wish to call it. As far as we can tell, we are the best there is.
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I tell the kids that, even in a childhood marked by despair and deprivation, I knew that no matter what happened,
BILL BRYSON







