When you consider it from a human perspective, and clearly it would be difficult for us to do otherwise, life is an odd thing. It couldn’t wait to get going, but then, having gotten going, it seemed in very little hurry to move on.
BILL BRYSONIf you drive to, say, Shenandoah National Park, or the Great Smoky Mountains, you’ll get some appreciation for the scale and beauty of the outdoors.
More Bill Bryson Quotes
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As a rule of thumb, I would submit that if you need to call your floss provider, for any reason, you are probably not ready for this level of oral hygiene.
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The best that can be said for Norwegian television is that it gives you the sensation of a coma without the worry and inconvenience.
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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 -
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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Christmas tree stands are the work of the devil and they want you dead.
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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.
BILL BRYSON -
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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Life just wants to be; but it doesn’t want to be much.
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And before long there will be no more milk in bottles delivered to the doorstep or sleepy rural pubs, and the countryside will be mostly shopping centers and theme parks.
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When you tell an Iowan a joke, you can see a kind of race going on between his brain and his expression.
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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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In France, a chemist named Pilatre de Rozier tested the flammability of hydrogen by gulping a mouthful and blowing across an open flame, proving at a stroke that hydrogen is indeed explosively combustible and that eyebrows are not necessarily a permanent feature of one’s face.
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There is something about the momentum of travel that makes you want to just keep moving, to never stop.
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Traveling is more fun – hell, life is more fun – if you can treat it as a series of impulses.
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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







