black
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Every last bit of it, good and bad – old churches, country lanes, people saying ‘Mustn’t grumble,’ and ‘I’m terribly sorry but,’ people apologizing to ME when I conk them with a careless elbow, milk in bottles, beans on toast, haymaking in June, seaside piers.

Bill Bryson

A cough so robust that I tapped into two new seams of phlegm.
BILL BRYSON

Health Robust Two
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
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
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
Finally, this being America, there is the constant possibility of murder.
BILL BRYSON

Country Murder Possibility
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.
BILL BRYSON

Angstrom Height Intimacy Levitating Sitting
The upshot of all this is that we live in a universe whose age we can’t quite compute, surrounded by stars whose distances we don’t altogether know, filled with matter we can’t identify, operating in conformance with physical laws whose properties we don’t truly understand.
BILL BRYSON

Distance Law Stars
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
What is it about maps? I could look at them all day, earnestly studying the names of towns and villages I have never heard of and will never visit.
BILL BRYSON

Looks Names Travel
There is something about the momentum of travel that makes you want to just keep moving, to never stop.
BILL BRYSON

Momentum Moving Want
To my surprise, I felt a certain springy keenness. I was ready to hike. I had waited months for this day, after all, even if it had been mostly with foreboding.
BILL BRYSON

Country Knees People Spring
Because we humans are big and clever enough to produce and utilize antibiotics and disinfectants, it is easy to convince ourselves that we have banished bacteria to the fringes of existence.
BILL BRYSON

Believe Cities Clever
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
Anyone who has read my books will know that I don’t tend to use guides when I am travelling. It’s not a pride thing, but it is certainly a fact.
BILL BRYSON

Book Pride Travelling Use
It had no practical application in his lifetime, but today, thanks to computers, is routinely used in the modelling of climate change, astrophysics and stock-market analysis.
BILL BRYSON

Analysis Astrophysics Market Modelling Practical Social

Every last bit of it, good and bad – old churches, country lanes, people saying ‘Mustn’t grumble,’ and ‘I’m terribly sorry but,’ people apologizing to ME when I conk them with a careless elbow, milk in bottles, beans on toast, haymaking in June, seaside piers.

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Every last bit of it, good and bad – old churches, country lanes, people saying ‘Mustn’t grumble,’ and ‘I’m terribly sorry but,’ people apologizing to ME when I conk them with a careless elbow, milk in bottles, beans on toast, haymaking in June, seaside piers.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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