If you believe in god, it’s much more fantastic to believe that he created this universe billions of years ago and set in motion this long train of activities that eventually resulted in us. I think that’s so much more satisfying, more thrilling, than the idea that it was all done in seven days.
BILL BRYSONA third…candidate for Shakespearean authorship was Christopher Marlowe. He was the right age (just two months older than Shakespeare), had the requisite talent, and would certainly have had ample leisure after 1593, assuming he wasn’t too dead to work.
More Bill Bryson Quotes
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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.
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It sometimes occurs to me that the British have more heritage than isgood for them.
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The one upstairs room in which the Duke had resided was packed to the ceiling with hundreds of green boxes, each of which contained a single dark brown wig. This was, in short, a man worth getting to know.
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Science has been quite embattled. It’s the most important thing there is. An arts graduate is not going to fix global warming. They may do other valuable things, but they are not going to fix the planet or cure cancer or get rid of malaria.
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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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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.
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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.
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Romans park their cars the way I would park if I had just spilled a beaker of hydrochloric acid on my lap.
BILL BRYSON -
I wanted to see what was out there. All over America today people would be dragging themselves to work, stuck in traffic jams, wreathed in exhaust smoke. I was going for a walk in the woods. I was more than ready for this.
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If this book has a lesson, it is that we are awfully lucky to be here-and by ‘we’ I mean every living thing. To attain any kind of life in this universe of ours appears to be quite an achievement.
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I became quietly seized with that nostalgia that overcomes you when you have reached the middle of your life and your father has recently died and it dawns on you that when he went he took some of you with him.
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A belief that no commercial activities must be allowed inside the park, but permitting unrestrained development outside, even though the landscape there may be just as outstanding.
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You may not feel outstandingly robust, but if you are an average-sized adult you will contain within your modest frame no less than 7 X 10^18 joules of potential energy.
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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.
BILL BRYSON -
Every living thing is an elaboration of a single original plan. As humans we are mere increments – each of us a musty archive of adjustments, adaptations, modifications and providential tinkerings stretching back to 3,8 billion years.
BILL BRYSON







