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When I was growing up I used to think that the best thing about coming from Des Moines was that it meant you didn’t come from anywhere else in Iowa. By Iowa standards.

Bill Bryson

When each winding back highway and plump hillside is suddenly and infinitely splashed with every sharp shade that nature can bestow – flaming scarlet, lustrous gold, throbbing vermilion, fiery orange.
BILL BRYSON

Bestow Hobbing Nature Orange Shade Vermilion
Beulah has a husband?’ I know. It’s a miracle. There can’t be more than two people on the planet who’d be willing to sleep with her, and here we are both in the same town.
BILL BRYSON

Husband Sleep Two
I became quietly seized with that nostalgia that overcomes you when you have reached the middle of your life and your father has recently died and it dawns on you that when he went he took some of you with him.
BILL BRYSON

Dawn Father Nostalgia Overcome Overcoming
You are going to have a day without even the tiniest of pleasures; you are going to drive across Ohio.
BILL BRYSON

Across Country Even Going Without
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 BRYSON

Believe Cities Clever
I love the feeling of being anonymous in a city I’ve never been before.
BILL BRYSON

Anonymous Cities Feelings Travel
He had the sort of face that makes you realize God does have a sense of humor.
BILL BRYSON

Doe Faces Sense Of Humor
The world, you realize, is enormous in a way that only you and a small community of fellow hikers know. Planetary scale is your little secret.
BILL BRYSON

Enormous Realize Scale Secret Way
Perhaps it’s my natural pessimism, but it seems that an awfully large part of travel these days is to see things while you still can.
BILL BRYSON

Memorable Pessimism Travel
What is it about maps? I could look at them all day, earnestly studying the names of towns and villages I have never heard of and will never visit.
BILL BRYSON

Looks Names Travel
I do find London exciting. Much as I hate to agree with that tedious old git Samuel Johnson, and despite the pompous imbecility of his famous remark about when a man is tired of London he is tired of life…I can’t dispute it.
BILL BRYSON

Famous Hate Men Pompous Tired
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

Average People Shoes
We are so used to the notion of our own inevitability as life’s dominant species that it is hard to grasp that we are here only because of timely extraterrestrial bangs and other random flukes.
BILL BRYSON

Doors Four Years
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
And a really good story because he was this kid who grew up essentially as an orphan, you know, had a tough life, and then he became the most successful baseball player ever. But he was also a really good guy.
BILL BRYSON

Essentially Good Orphan Player Story Successful
Traveling is more fun – hell, life is more fun – if you can treat it as a series of impulses.
BILL BRYSON

Fun Hell Life

When I was growing up I used to think that the best thing about coming from Des Moines was that it meant you didn’t come from anywhere else in Iowa. By Iowa standards.

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When I was growing up I used to think that the best thing about coming from Des Moines was that it meant you didn’t come from anywhere else in Iowa. By Iowa standards.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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