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 BRYSONAmong the errors cited in this book are a number committed by some of the leading authorities of this century. If men such as Fowler and Bernstein and Quirk and Howard cannot always get their English right, is it reasonable to expect the rest of us to?
More Bill Bryson Quotes
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America has never quite grasped that you can live in a place without making it ugly, that beauty doesn’t have to be confined behind fences, as if a national park were a sort of zoo for nature.
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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 -
The world, you realize, is enormous in a way that only you and a small community of fellow hikers know. Planetary scale is your little secret.
BILL BRYSON -
On the dashboard of our family car is a shallow indentation about the size of a paperback book. If you are looking for somewhere to put your sunglasses or spare change, it is the obvious place, and it works extremely well,
BILL BRYSON -
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 -
More than 300 million people in the world speak English and the rest, it sometimes seems, try to.
BILL BRYSON -
Physicists are atoms’ way of thinking about atoms.
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It is a curious feature of our existance that we come from a planet that is very good at promoting life but even better at extinguishing it.
BILL BRYSON -
“Croissant”: However you choose to pronounce it at home, it is perhaps worth nothing that outside the United States, the closer you can come to saying “kwass-ohn,” the sooner you can expect to be presented with one.
BILL BRYSON -
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.
BILL BRYSON -
I wanted to quit and to do this forever, sleep in a bed and in a tent, see what was over the next hill and never see a hill again. All of this all at once, every moment, on the trail or off.
BILL BRYSON -
Everything seems to be designed for the benefit of the automobile and not the benefit of the human being.
BILL BRYSON -
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.
BILL BRYSON -
Why is it, I wondered, that old people are always so self-centered and excitable? But I just smiled benignly and stood back, comforted by the thought that soon they would be dead.
BILL BRYSON -
Everything that has ever lived, plant or animal, dates its beginning from the same primordial twitch. At some point in an unimaginably distant past, some little bag of chemicals fidgeted to life. It absorbed some nutrients, gently pulsed, had a brief existence.
BILL BRYSON