Every atom you possess has almost certainly passed through several stars and been part of millions of organisms on its way to becoming you.
BILL BRYSONThere is no such thing, incidentally, as one kudo.
More Bill Bryson Quotes
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The remarkable position in which we find ourselves is that we don’t actually know what we actually know.
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This was 1990, the year that communism died in Europe and it seemed strange to me that in all the words that were written about the fall of the iron curtain, nobody anywhere lamented that it was the end of a noble experiment.
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Clearly, some time ago makers and consumers of American junk food passed jointly through some kind of sensibility barrier in the endless quest for new taste sensations.
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I love the feeling of being anonymous in a city I’ve never been before.
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My first rule of travel is never to go to a place that sounds like a medical condition and Critz is clearly an incurable disease involving flaking skin.
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Of all the things I am not very good at, living in the real world is perhaps the most outstanding.
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On the dashboard of our family car is a shallow indentation about the size of a paperback book. If you are looking for somewhere to put your sunglasses or spare change, it is the obvious place, and it works extremely well,
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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.
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Most scientists are without exception adorably quirky, and one of the ways of making it more accessible was to try to get readers interested in the person.
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That’s the trouble with losing your mind; by the time it’s gone, it’s too late to get it back.
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Energy is liberated matter, matter is energy waiting to happen.
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There is the odd exception, like Albert Einstein, but as a breed, scientists tend not be very good at presenting themselves.
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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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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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When you sit in a chair, you are not actually sitting there, but levitating above it at a height of one angstrom (a hundred millionth of a centimetre), your electrons and its electrons implacably opposed to any closer intimacy.
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Human beings would split the atom and invent television, nylon, and instant coffee before they could figure out the age of their own planet.
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It was the kind of pure, undiffused light that can only come from a really hot blue sky, the kind that makes even a concrete highway painful to behold and turns every distant reflective surface into a little glint of flame.
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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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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Time, you discover, has wrought changes that leave you feeling mildly foolish and out of touch.
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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.
BILL BRYSON -
We are each so atomically numberous and so vigorously recycled at death that a significant number of our atoms-up to a billion for each of us, it has been suggested-probably once belonged to Shakespeare.
BILL BRYSON -
From an evolutionary point of view, sex is really just a reward mechanism to encourage us to pass on our genetic material.
BILL BRYSON -
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 -
Your pillow alone may be home to 40 million bed mites. (To them your head is just one large oily bon-bon). And don’t think a clean pillow-case will make a difference…
BILL BRYSON -
Roads get wider and busier and less friendly to pedestrians. And all of the development based around cars, like big sprawling shopping malls.
BILL BRYSON