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Des Moines is like your typical American city; it’s just these concentric circles of malls, built outward from the city.

Bill Bryson

If you can imagine a man having a vasectomy without anesthetic to the sound of frantic sitar-playing, you will have some idea of what popular Turkish music is like.
BILL BRYSON

Frantic Idea Ideas Men Sound Vasectomy
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.
BILL BRYSON

Dawn Father Nostalgia Overcome Overcoming
Ordnance Survey maps, tea and crumpets, summer showers and foggy winter evenings – every bit of it.
BILL BRYSON

Evening Maps Shower Summer Survey
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
It is not as if farming brought a great improvement in living standards either. A typical hunter-gatherer enjoyed a more varied diet and consumed more protein and calories than settled people, and took in five times as much viatmin C as the average person today.
BILL BRYSON

Average Consumed People Protein Today Typical
In the countryside, litter doesn’t have a friend. It doesn’t have anybody who’s saying, ‘Wait a minute, this is really starting to get out of control.’
BILL BRYSON

Control Minutes Starting Waiting
In order to perpetuate the only possible sequence of hereditary combinations that could result — eventually, astoundingly, and all too briefly — in you.
BILL BRYSON

Astoundingly Briefly Combination Result
But here’s an extrememly salient point: we have been chosen, by fate or Providence or whatever you wish to call it. As far as we can tell, we are the best there is.
BILL BRYSON

Chosen Far Providence Whatever Wish
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

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

Health Robust Two
Germans are flummoxed by humor, the Swiss have no concept of fun, the Spanish think there is nothing at all ridiculous about eating dinner at midnight, and the Italians should never, ever have been let in on the invention of the motor car.
BILL BRYSON

Fun Inspirational Sarcastic
We used to build civilizations. Now we build shopping malls.
BILL BRYSON

Ass Bad Badass Civilization
I’m quite certain that if the rest of the world vanished overnight and the development of cricket were left in Australian hands, within a generation, the players would be wearing shorts and using the bats to hit each other, and the thing is, it’d be a much better game for it.
BILL BRYSON

Games Generation Hands Player Vanish
There is something about the momentum of travel that makes you want to just keep moving, to never stop.
BILL BRYSON

Momentum Moving Want
Very little of what America does is actually bad, and I don’t think it ever does anything anywhere that is intentionally bad. I mean, sometimes we make mistakes and bad judgments and kind of back the wrong regimes and things, but by and large what America does is really good.
BILL BRYSON

Mean Mistake Thinking
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

Des Moines is like your typical American city; it’s just these concentric circles of malls, built outward from the city.

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Des Moines is like your typical American city; it’s just these concentric circles of malls, built outward from the city.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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