I come from Des Moines. Someone had to.
BILL BRYSONBoston’s freeway system is insane. It was clearly designed by a person who had spent his childhood crashing toy trains.
More Bill Bryson Quotes
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Christmas tree stands are the work of the devil and they want you dead.
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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.
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“Croissant”: However you choose to pronounce it at home, it is perhaps worth nothing that outside the United States, the closer you can come to saying “kwass-ohn,” the sooner you can expect to be presented with one.
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Cheapness is a great virtue.
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You may find that your parents are the most delightful people, but you don’t want to live with them.
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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 -
Traveling makes you realize what an immeasurably nice place much of America could be if only people possessed the same instinct for preservation as they do in Europe.
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By the time I had finished my coffee and returned to the streets, the rain had temporarily abated, but the streets were full of vast puddles where the drains where unable to cope with the volume of water.
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Distance changes utterly when you take the world on foot. A mile becomes a long way, two miles literally considerable, ten miles whopping, fifty miles at the very limits of conception.
BILL BRYSON -
If 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.
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Every kid I knew had a father with a little stash of men’s magazines which the father thought was secret and which the kid knew all about.
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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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Everything that has ever lived, plant or animal, dates its beginning from the same primordial twitch. At some point in an unimaginably distant past, some little bag of chemicals fidgeted to life. It absorbed some nutrients, gently pulsed, had a brief existence.
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You may not feel outstandingly robust, but if you are an average-sized adult you will contain within your modest frame no less than 7 X 10^18 joules of potential energy.
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From an evolutionary point of view, sex is really just a reward mechanism to encourage us to pass on our genetic material.
BILL BRYSON