If you were designing an organism to look after life in our lonely cosmos, to monitor where it is going and keep a record of where it has been, you wouldn’t choose human beings for the job.
BILL BRYSONIf this book has a lesson, it is that we are awfully lucky to be here-and by ‘we’ I mean every living thing. To attain any kind of life in this universe of ours appears to be quite an achievement.
More Bill Bryson Quotes
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As the saying goes, it takes all kinds to make the world go around, though perhaps some shouldn’t go quite so far around it as others.
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Life just wants to be; but it doesn’t want to be much.
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When you sit in a chair, you are not actually sitting there, but levitating above it at a height of one angstrom (a hundred millionth of a centimetre), your electrons and its electrons implacably opposed to any closer intimacy.
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It is the only sport that shares its name with an insect. It is the only sport in which spectators burn as many calories as players – more if they are moderately restless.
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English is full of booby traps for the unwary foreigner. Any language where the unassuming word fly signifies an annoying insect, a means of travel, and a critical part of a gentleman’s apparel is clearly asking to be mangled.
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Des Moines is like your typical American city; it’s just these concentric circles of malls, built outward from the city.
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The best that can be said for Norwegian television is that it gives you the sensation of a coma without the worry and inconvenience.
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Why is it, I wondered, that old people are always so self-centered and excitable? But I just smiled benignly and stood back, comforted by the thought that soon they would be dead.
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I just use my life story as a kind of device on which to hang comic observations. It’s not my interest or instinct to tell the world anything pertinent about myself or my family.
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As humans we are doubly lucky, of course: We enjoy not only the privilege of existence but also the singular ability to appreciate it and even, in a multitude of ways, to make it better. It is a talent we have only barely begun to grasp.
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Most of what has lived on Earth has left behind no record at all.
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Romans park their cars the way I would park if I had just spilled a beaker of hydrochloric acid on my lap.
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Traveling is more fun – hell, life is more fun – if you can treat it as a series of impulses.
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My first rule of travel is never to go to a place that sounds like a medical condition and Critz is clearly an incurable disease involving flaking skin.
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The great failure in education, much of the time, is the lack of excitement and stimulus
BILL BRYSON