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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

I 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.
BILL BRYSON

Bored Boring Moments
Where I grew up, in Des Moines, Iowa, there is hardly any downtown economic activity now. Everybody shops in malls – you don’t find a sense of community in malls.
BILL BRYSON

Community Downtown Iowa
Most of what has lived on Earth has left behind no record at all.
BILL BRYSON

Earth Left Behind Records
A world without newspapers or a world where the newspapers are purely electronic and you read them on a screen is not a very appealing world.
BILL BRYSON

Newspapers Screens World
In France, a chemist named Pilatre de Rozier tested the flammability of hydrogen by gulping a mouthful and blowing across an open flame, proving at a stroke that hydrogen is indeed explosively combustible and that eyebrows are not necessarily a permanent feature of one’s face.
BILL BRYSON

Eyebrows Flames Science
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.
BILL BRYSON

Air Coffee Country Language Splits
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

Order Quests Tiny
In the morning I awoke early and experienced that sinking sensation that overcomes you when you first open your eyes and realize that instead of a normal day ahead of you, with its scatterings of simple gratifications.
BILL BRYSON

Eye Morning Simple
For most of us the rules of English grammar are at best a dimly remembered thing. But even for those who make the rules, grammatical correctitude sometimes proves easier to urge than to achieve.
BILL BRYSON

Book Grammatically Men Remembered Writing
America is a very seductive place in terms of lifestyle and comfort, but it wasn’t for me.
BILL BRYSON

Comfort Country Seductive
A billion more each came from Buddha and Genghis Khan and Beethoven, and any other historical figure you care to name.
BILL BRYSON

Billion Buddha Name
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

Car Friendly Shopping
I tell the kids that, even in a childhood marked by despair and deprivation, I knew that no matter what happened,
BILL BRYSON

Childhood Deprivation Divorce Kids
Suddenly, in the space of a moment, I realized what it was that I loved about Britain – which is to say, all of it.
BILL BRYSON

Country Loved Sorry Suddenly Summer
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.
BILL BRYSON

Exception Quirky Scientist Trying Way
It is not as if farming brought a great improvement in living standards either. A typical hunter-gatherer enjoyed a more varied diet and consumed more protein and calories than settled people, and took in five times as much viatmin C as the average person today.
BILL BRYSON

Average Consumed People Protein Today Typical

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.

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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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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