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.
BILL BRYSONBut what is life to a lichen ? Yet its impulse to exist, to be, is every bit as strong as ours arguably even stronger. If I were told that I had to spend decades being a furry growth on a rock in the woods, I believe I would lose the will to go on.
More Bill Bryson Quotes
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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.
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I don’t know whether I’m misanthropic. It seems to me I’m constantly disappointed. I’m very easily disappointed.
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Still, I never really mind bad service in a restaurant. It makes me feel better about not leaving a tip.
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If 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.
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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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But what is life to a lichen ? Yet its impulse to exist, to be, is every bit as strong as ours arguably even stronger. If I were told that I had to spend decades being a furry growth on a rock in the woods, I believe I would lose the will to go on.
BILL BRYSON -
I think it’s only right that crazy people should have their own city, but I cannot for the life of me see why a sane person would want to go there.
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The amazing complex delicacy of the words, the casual ease with which elemental things come together to form a composition that is-whatever the season, wherever I put my besotted gaze-perfect.
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The tearoom lady called me love. All the shop ladies called me love and most of the men called me mate. I hadn’t been here twelve hours and already they loved me.
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A cough so robust that I tapped into two new seams of phlegm.
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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.
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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.
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I love the feeling of being anonymous in a city I’ve never been before.
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The first book I did – the first successful book – was a kind of a travel book, and publishers in Britain encouraged me to do more.
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Most of what has lived on Earth has left behind no record at all.
BILL BRYSON






