You don’t have to know anything about baseball to respond to Babe Ruth because he’s just this magnificent human being.
BILL BRYSONChristmas tree stands are the work of the devil and they want you dead.
More Bill Bryson Quotes
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You are going to have a day without even the tiniest of pleasures; you are going to drive across Ohio.
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A billion more each came from Buddha and Genghis Khan and Beethoven, and any other historical figure you care to name.
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Des Moines is a mecca of cosmopolitanism, a dynamic hub of wealth and education, where people wear three-piece suits and dark socks, often simultaneously.
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In the countryside, litter doesn’t have a friend. It doesn’t have anybody who’s saying, ‘Wait a minute, this is really starting to get out of control.’
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Don’t you believe it. Bacteria may not build cities or have interesting social lives, but they will be here when the Sun explodes. This is their planet, and we are on it only because they allow us to be.
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To me, the greatest invention of my lifetime is the laptop computer and the fact that I can be working on a book and be in an airport lounge, in a hotel room, and continue working; I fire up my laptop, and I’m in exactly the same place I was when I left home – that, to me, is a miracle.
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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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In three minutes, 98 percent of all the matter there is or will ever be has been produced. We have a universe
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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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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.
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Very little of what America does is actually bad, and I don’t think it ever does anything anywhere that is intentionally bad. I mean, sometimes we make mistakes and bad judgments and kind of back the wrong regimes and things, but by and large what America does is really good.
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The great failure in education, much of the time, is the lack of excitement and stimulus
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For a long time, I’d been vaguely fascinated by the idea that Charles Lindbergh flew the Atlantic and Babe Ruth hit 60 home runs in the same summer.
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The English invented cricket to make other human endeavors look interesting.
BILL BRYSON -
Not one of your pertinent ancestors was squashed, devoured, drowned, starved, stranded, stuck fast, untimely wounded, or otherwise deflected from its life’s quest of delivering a tiny charge of genetic material to the right partner at the right moment.
BILL BRYSON -
America has never quite grasped that you can live in a place without making it ugly, that beauty doesn’t have to be confined behind fences, as if a national park were a sort of zoo for nature.
BILL BRYSON -
This much may have happened many times before. But this ancestral packet did something additional and extraordinary. It cleaved itself and produced an heir.
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Among the errors cited in this book are a number committed by some of the leading authorities of this century. If men such as Fowler and Bernstein and Quirk and Howard cannot always get their English right, is it reasonable to expect the rest of us to?
BILL BRYSON -
So here I am, my affections torn between a postal service that never feeds me but can tackle a challenge and one that gives me free tape and prompt service but won’t help me out when I can’t remember a street name.
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In terms of adaptability, humans are pretty amazingly useless.
BILL BRYSON -
People don’t talk like this, theytalklikethis. Syllables, words, sentences run together like a watercolour left in the rain.
BILL BRYSON -
America is a very seductive place in terms of lifestyle and comfort, but it wasn’t for me.
BILL BRYSON -
So that buildings and structures you normally pass without a glance suddenly become arresting, even beautiful? Well, they seem to have that light in Australia nearly all the time.
BILL BRYSON -
I don’t know whether I’m misanthropic. It seems to me I’m constantly disappointed. I’m very easily disappointed.
BILL BRYSON -
I love everything about motels. I can’t help myself. I still get excited every time I slip a key into a motel room door and fling it open.
BILL BRYSON -
Everything seems to be designed for the benefit of the automobile and not the benefit of the human being.
BILL BRYSON