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Now 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.

Bill Bryson

All the things that are part of your heritage make you British – that makes this country what it is. It’s part of your history. And here, unlike America, it’s still living history.
BILL BRYSON

Country Heritage History Thing
You may find that your parents are the most delightful people, but you don’t want to live with them.
BILL BRYSON

May Parents People
You don’t have to know anything about baseball to respond to Babe Ruth because he’s just this magnificent human being.
BILL BRYSON

Baseball Kids Successful
The English invented cricket to make other human endeavors look interesting.
BILL BRYSON

Cricket Interesting Looks
This much may have happened many times before. But this ancestral packet did something additional and extraordinary. It cleaved itself and produced an heir.
BILL BRYSON

Additional Cleaveed Produced Something
To understand what anyone is saying to us we must separate these noises into words and the words into sentences so that we might in our turn issue a stream of mixed sounds in response.
BILL BRYSON

Noises Sentences Separate Stream Understand
Physicists are atoms’ way of thinking about atoms.
BILL BRYSON

Atom Thinking Way
Britain still has the most reliably beautiful countryside of anywhere in the world. I would hate to be part of the generation that allowed that to be lost.
BILL BRYSON

Beautiful Generations Hate
If you drive to, say, Shenandoah National Park, or the Great Smoky Mountains, you’ll get some appreciation for the scale and beauty of the outdoors.
BILL BRYSON

Appreciation Gratitude Mountain
My favourite fellow of the Royal Society is the Reverend Thomas Bayes, an obscure 18th-century Kent clergyman and a brilliant mathematician who devised a complex equation known as the Bayes theorem, which can be used to work out probability distributions.
BILL BRYSON

Distribution Out Royal Science Work
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

Number Probably Significance Suggest
I understand now, in a way I never did before, the colossal scale of the world. I found patience and fortitude that I didn’t know I had. I discovered an America that millions of people scarcely know exists. I made a friend. I came home.
BILL BRYSON

Country Discovered Found Million Patience People
Houses aren’t refuges from history. They are where history ends up.
BILL BRYSON

Ends House Refuge
A sign in the yard of a church next door said CHRIST IS THE ANSWER. (The question, of course, is: What do you say when you strike your thumb with a hammer?)
BILL BRYSON

Church Doors Yards
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
Nearly a quarter of American men were in the Armed forces. The rest were in school, in prison, or were George W. Bush.
BILL BRYSON

Men Prison School
Life just wants to be; but it doesn’t want to be much.
BILL BRYSON

Life Want Wonderful
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
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

Arresting Building Country Nearly Structures Time
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.
BILL BRYSON

Father Kids Men
There is something about the momentum of travel that makes you want to just keep moving, to never stop.
BILL BRYSON

Momentum Moving Want
And before long there will be no more milk in bottles delivered to the doorstep or sleepy rural pubs, and the countryside will be mostly shopping centers and theme parks.
BILL BRYSON

Mean Shopping Sorry
Romans park their cars the way I would park if I had just spilled a beaker of hydrochloric acid on my lap.
BILL BRYSON

Car Hydrochloric Lap Way
We live on a planet that has a more or less infinite capacity to surprise. What reasoning person could possibly want it any other way?
BILL BRYSON

Frustrating Infinite Live Person Possibly
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
Maine is wonderful. It can be very hard. I mean, if you look at the profile maps it doesn’t look it, but somehow when you get out there it’s really steep and hard.
BILL BRYSON

Looks Maps Mean Wonderful
The tearoom lady called me love. All the shop ladies called me love and most of the men called me mate. I hadn’t been here twelve hours and already they loved me.
BILL BRYSON

Hours Men Twelve

Now 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.

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Now 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.

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Popular Authors

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