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Those who sniff decay in every shift of sense or alteration of usage do the language no service. Too often for such people the notion of good English has less to do with expressing ideas clearly than with making words conform to some arbitrary pattern.

Bill Bryson

Des Moines is like your typical American city; it’s just these concentric circles of malls, built outward from the city.
BILL BRYSON

Circles Cities Typical
A tiny bundle of genetic material passed from one living entity to another, and has never stopped moving since. It was the moment of creation for us all.
BILL BRYSON

Another Bundle Creation Material Passed
Every last bit of it, good and bad – old churches, country lanes, people saying ‘Mustn’t grumble,’ and ‘I’m terribly sorry but,’ people apologizing to ME when I conk them with a careless elbow, milk in bottles, beans on toast, haymaking in June, seaside piers.
BILL BRYSON

Apologizing Church Every Grumble Last Old People
There seemed to be a mystifying universal conspiracy among textbook authors to make certain the material they dealt with never strayed too near the realm of the mildly interesting and was always at least a long-distance phone call from the frankly interesting.
BILL BRYSON

Distance Long Phones
It’s hard not to be kind of pessimistic about human beings generally, because we do tend to mess things up. If you just look at the history of extinctions, we’ve killed off an awful lot of animals – and I don’t think we’re doing a very good job of looking after the planet.
BILL BRYSON

Animal History Human Jobs Pessimistic Thinking
I still enjoy traveling a lot. I mean, it amazes me that I still get excited in hotel rooms just to see what kind of shampoo they’ve left me.
BILL BRYSON

Kind Mean Rooms
I wanted to quit and to do this forever, sleep in a bed and in a tent, see what was over the next hill and never see a hill again. All of this all at once, every moment, on the trail or off.
BILL BRYSON

Bed Forever Sleep
Life just wants to be; but it doesn’t want to be much.
BILL BRYSON

Life Want Wonderful
Everywhere throughout New England you find old, tumbledown field walls, often in the middle of the deepest, most settled- looking woods- a reminder of just how swiftly nature reclaims the land in America.
BILL BRYSON

Country Deepest Land Look Wall
The English invented cricket to make other human endeavors look interesting.
BILL BRYSON

Cricket Interesting Looks
I’m not a natural story-teller. Put a keyboard in front of me and I’m fine, but stand me up in front of an audience and I’m actually quite shy and reserved.
BILL BRYSON

Keyboards Shy Stories
You don’t need a science degree to understand about science. You just need to think about it.
BILL BRYSON

Science Thinking Understanding
We used to build civilizations. Now we build shopping malls.
BILL BRYSON

Ass Bad Badass Civilization
I understand cricket – what’s going on, the scoring – but I can’t understand why.
BILL BRYSON

Cricket Scoring Understand
Traveling is more fun – hell, life is more fun – if you can treat it as a series of impulses.
BILL BRYSON

Fun Hell Life
In France, a chemist named Pilatre de Rozier tested the flammability of hydrogen by gulping a mouthful and blowing across an open flame, proving at a stroke that hydrogen is indeed explosively combustible and that eyebrows are not necessarily a permanent feature of one’s face.
BILL BRYSON

Eyebrows Flames Science

Those who sniff decay in every shift of sense or alteration of usage do the language no service. Too often for such people the notion of good English has less to do with expressing ideas clearly than with making words conform to some arbitrary pattern.

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Those who sniff decay in every shift of sense or alteration of usage do the language no service. Too often for such people the notion of good English has less to do with expressing ideas clearly than with making words conform to some arbitrary pattern.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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