The great failure in education, much of the time, is the lack of excitement and stimulus
BILL BRYSONI mused for a few moments on the question of which was worse, to lead a life so boring that you are easily enchanted, or a life so full of stimulus that you are easily bored.
More Bill Bryson Quotes
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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.
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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.
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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,
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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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We forget just how painfully dim the world was before electricity. A candle, a good candle, provides barely a hundredth of the illumination of a single 100 watt light bulb.
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I wanted to see what was out there. All over America today people would be dragging themselves to work, stuck in traffic jams, wreathed in exhaust smoke. I was going for a walk in the woods. I was more than ready for this.
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It was one of those sumptuous days when the world is full of autumn muskiness and tangy, crisp perfection: vivid blue sky, deep green fields, leaves in a thousand luminous hues. It is a truly astounding sight when every tree in a landscape becomes individual.
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Making English grammar conform to Latin rules is like asking people to play baseball using the rules of football.
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There is no reason why we shouldn’t be able to split an infinitive, any more than we should forsake instant coffee and air travel because they weren’t available to the Romans.
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Because we humans are big and clever enough to produce and utilize antibiotics and disinfectants, it is easy to convince ourselves that we have banished bacteria to the fringes of existence.
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Now they are a little like those desperate junkies who have tried every known drug and are finally reduced to mainlining toilet bowl cleanser in an effort to get still higher.
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Although a few antibiotics have been toughened up a bit, the pharmaceutical industry hasn’t given us an entirely new antibiotic since the 1970s.
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A cough so robust that I tapped into two new seams of phlegm.
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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.
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Everything seems to be designed for the benefit of the automobile and not the benefit of the human being.
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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.
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…and it occurred to me, with the forcefulness of a thought experienced in 360 degrees, that that’s really what history mostly is: masses of people doing ordinary things.
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I always wanted to do a baseball book; I love baseball. The problem is that a very large part of my following is in non-baseball playing countries.
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It is a slightly arresting notion that if you were to pick yourself apart with tweezers, one atom at a time, you would produce a mound of fine atomic dust, none of which had ever been alive but all of which had once been you.
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Science has been quite embattled. It’s the most important thing there is. An arts graduate is not going to fix global warming. They may do other valuable things, but they are not going to fix the planet or cure cancer or get rid of malaria.
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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 BRYSON -
I have a small tattered clipping that I sometimes carry with meand pull out for purposes of privateamusement. It’s a weather forecast from theWestern Daily Mail and it says, in toto: ‘Outlook: Dry and warm, but cooler with some rain.
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I must say, so long as the car is not actually moving. However, as soon as you put the car in motion … everything slides off … It can hold nothing that has not been nailed to it. So I ask you: what then is it for?
BILL BRYSON -
Woods are not like other spaces. To begin with, they are cubic. Their trees surround you, loom over you, press in from all sides. Woods choke off views & leave you muddled & without bearings.
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Geologists are never at a loss for paperweights.
BILL BRYSON -
There is more difference between a zebra and a horse, or between a dolphin and a porpoise, than there is between you and the furry creatures your distant ancestors left behind when they set out to take over the world.
BILL BRYSON