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 BRYSONNow they are a little like those desperate junkies who have tried every known drug and are finally reduced to mainlining toilet bowl cleanser in an effort to get still higher.
More Bill Bryson Quotes
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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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That is jargon – the practice of never calling a spade a spade when you might instead call it a manual earth-restructuring implement – and it is one of the great curses of modern English.
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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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At a conference of sociologists in America in 1977, love was defined as “the cognitive-affective state characterized by intrusive and obsessive fantasizing concerning reciprocity of amorant feelings by the object of the amorance.”.
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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.
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As humans we are doubly lucky, of course: We enjoy not only the privilege of existence but also the singular ability to appreciate it and even, in a multitude of ways, to make it better. It is a talent we have only barely begun to grasp.
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It was one of those sumptuous days when the world is full of autumn muskiness and tangy, crisp perfection: vivid blue sky, deep green fields, leaves in a thousand luminous hues. It is a truly astounding sight when every tree in a landscape becomes individual.
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Des Moines is like your typical American city; it’s just these concentric circles of malls, built outward from the city.
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The food is excellent. The beer is cold. The sun nearly always shines. There is coffee on every corner. Life doesn’t get much better than this.
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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.
BILL BRYSON -
I had spent the whole of my savings … on a suit for the wedding – a remarkable piece of apparel with lapels that had been modelled on the tail fins of a 1957 Coupe de Ville and trousers so copiously flared that when I walked you didn’t see my legs move.
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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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When the poet Paul Valery once asked Albert Einstein if he kept a notebook to record his ideas, Einstein looked at him with mild but genuine surprise. “Oh, that’s not necessary,” he replied . “It’s so seldom I have one.
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Time, you discover, has wrought changes that leave you feeling mildly foolish and out of touch.
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Every twenty minutes on the Appalachian Trail, Katz and I walked farther than the average American walks in a week. For 93 percent of all trips outside the home, for whatever distance or whatever purpose,
BILL BRYSON







