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 BRYSONIf a potato can produce vitamin C, why can’t we? Within the animal kingdom only humans and guinea pigs are unable to synthesize vitamin C in their own bodies. Why us and guinea pigs? No point asking. Nobody knows.
More Bill Bryson Quotes
-
-
I know that communism never worked and I would have disliked living under it myself but none the less it seems that there was a kind of sadness in the thought that the only economic system that appeared to work was one based on self interest and greed.
BILL BRYSON -
The average Southerner has the speech patterns of someone slipping in and out of consciousness. I can change my shoes and socks faster than most people in Mississippi can speak a sentence.
BILL BRYSON -
But I got a great deal else from the experience. I learned to pitch a tent and sleep beneath the stars. For a brief, proud period I was slender and fit. I gained a profound respect for the wilderness and nature and the benign dark power of woods.
BILL BRYSON -
It had no practical application in his lifetime, but today, thanks to computers, is routinely used in the modelling of climate change, astrophysics and stock-market analysis.
BILL BRYSON -
I can’t think of anything that excites a greater sense of childlike wonder than to be in a country where you are ignorant of almost everything.
BILL BRYSON -
We live on a planet that has a more or less infinite capacity to surprise. What reasoning person could possibly want it any other way?
BILL BRYSON -
Correct me if I’m wrong, but you would think that if one nation ought by now to have mastered the science of drainage, Britain would be it.
BILL BRYSON -
Human beings would split the atom and invent television, nylon, and instant coffee before they could figure out the age of their own planet.
BILL BRYSON -
Every living thing is an elaboration of a single original plan. As humans we are mere increments – each of us a musty archive of adjustments, adaptations, modifications and providential tinkerings stretching back to 3,8 billion years.
BILL BRYSON -
Yes, U.S. travelers dress better. The British are always so conspicuous in hot climates. They don’t seem to wear shorts. American men seem to be comfortable wearing hot-weather clothing.
BILL BRYSON -
That’s the trouble with losing your mind; by the time it’s gone, it’s too late to get it back.
BILL BRYSON -
That’s 270 million people with 206 bones each – will only be about 50 bones, one-quarter of a complete skeleton. That’s not to say, of course, that any of these bones will ever actually be found.
BILL BRYSON -
In the morning I awoke early and experienced that sinking sensation that overcomes you when you first open your eyes and realize that instead of a normal day ahead of you, with its scatterings of simple gratifications.
BILL BRYSON -
A cough so robust that I tapped into two new seams of phlegm.
BILL BRYSON -
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