We used to build civilizations. Now we build shopping malls.
BILL BRYSONHe had the sort of face that makes you realize God does have a sense of humor.
More Bill Bryson Quotes
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Time, you discover, has wrought changes that leave you feeling mildly foolish and out of touch.
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But what is life to a lichen ? Yet its impulse to exist, to be, is every bit as strong as ours arguably even stronger. If I were told that I had to spend decades being a furry growth on a rock in the woods, I believe I would lose the will to go on.
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I’m not a natural story-teller. Put a keyboard in front of me and I’m fine, but stand me up in front of an audience and I’m actually quite shy and reserved.
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The whole of the global economy is based on supplying the cravings of two per cent of the world’s population.
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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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Although a few antibiotics have been toughened up a bit, the pharmaceutical industry hasn’t given us an entirely new antibiotic since the 1970s.
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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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I tell the kids that, even in a childhood marked by despair and deprivation, I knew that no matter what happened,
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I have long known that it is part of God’s plan for me to spend a little time with each of the most stupid people on earth.
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Suddenly you are five years old again. You can’t read anything, you have only the most rudimentary sense of how things work, you can’t even reliably cross a street without endangering your life. Your whole existence becomes a series of interesting guesses.
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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Consider the Lichen. Lichens are just about the hardiest visible organisms on Earth, but the least ambitious.
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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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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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Traveling makes you realize what an immeasurably nice place much of America could be if only people possessed the same instinct for preservation as they do in Europe.
BILL BRYSON