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Britain still has the most reliably beautiful countryside of anywhere in the world. I would hate to be part of the generation that allowed that to be lost.

Bill Bryson

When I was growing up I used to think that the best thing about coming from Des Moines was that it meant you didn’t come from anywhere else in Iowa. By Iowa standards.
BILL BRYSON

Dark Growing Thinking Up
This was 1990, the year that communism died in Europe and it seemed strange to me that in all the words that were written about the fall of the iron curtain, nobody anywhere lamented that it was the end of a noble experiment.
BILL BRYSON

Fall Sadness Self
If a potato can produce vitamin C, why can’t we? Within the animal kingdom only humans and guinea pigs are unable to synthesize vitamin C in their own bodies. Why us and guinea pigs? No point asking. Nobody knows.
BILL BRYSON

Animal Asking Pigs
There is something about the momentum of travel that makes you want to just keep moving, to never stop.
BILL BRYSON

Momentum Moving Want
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 no such thing, incidentally, as one kudo.
BILL BRYSON

Incidentally Such Things
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.
BILL BRYSON

Beauty Behind Country Fences Grasped Making Nature
Language is more fashion than science, and matters of usage, spelling and pronunciation tend to wander around like hemlines.
BILL BRYSON

Fashion Matter Writing
But I got a great deal else from the experience. I learned to pitch a tent and sleep beneath the stars. For a brief, proud period I was slender and fit. I gained a profound respect for the wilderness and nature and the benign dark power of woods.
BILL BRYSON

Beneath Gained Home Sleep Stars
I don’t know whether I’m misanthropic. It seems to me I’m constantly disappointed. I’m very easily disappointed.
BILL BRYSON

Disappoint Knows Misanthropic
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.
BILL BRYSON

Eyebrows Flames Science
By the most astounding stroke of luck an infinitesimal portion of all the matter in the universe came together to create you and for the tiniest moment in the great span of eternity you have the incomparable privilege to exist.
BILL BRYSON

Eternity Moment Time Together Universe
Boston’s freeway system is insane. It was clearly designed by a person who had spent his childhood crashing toy trains.
BILL BRYSON

Boston Childhood Insane
The amazing complex delicacy of the words, the casual ease with which elemental things come together to form a composition that is-whatever the season, wherever I put my besotted gaze-perfect.
BILL BRYSON

Amazing Composition Perfect Season Together Words
In a funny way, nothing makes you feel more like a native of your own country than to live where nearly everyone is not.
BILL BRYSON

Country Feels Way
Not one of your pertinent ancestors was squashed, devoured, drowned, starved, stranded, stuck fast, untimely wounded, or otherwise deflected from its life’s quest of delivering a tiny charge of genetic material to the right partner at the right moment.
BILL BRYSON

Order Quests Tiny
As humans we are doubly lucky, of course: We enjoy not only the privilege of existence but also the singular ability to appreciate it and even, in a multitude of ways, to make it better. It is a talent we have only barely begun to grasp.
BILL BRYSON

Ability Existence Human Multitude Privilege Singular
We live on a planet that has a more or less infinite capacity to surprise. What reasoning person could possibly want it any other way?
BILL BRYSON

Frustrating Infinite Live Person Possibly
The first book I did – the first successful book – was a kind of a travel book, and publishers in Britain encouraged me to do more.
BILL BRYSON

Book First Successful
Romans park their cars the way I would park if I had just spilled a beaker of hydrochloric acid on my lap.
BILL BRYSON

Car Hydrochloric Lap Way
We are each so atomically numberous and so vigorously recycled at death that a significant number of our atoms-up to a billion for each of us, it has been suggested-probably once belonged to Shakespeare.
BILL BRYSON

Number Probably Significance Suggest
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

Apologizing Church Every Grumble Last Old People
In three minutes, 98 percent of all the matter there is or will ever be has been produced. We have a universe
BILL BRYSON

Matter Minutes Three
When the Duke [W.J.C. Scott-Bentinck] died, his heirs found all of the aboveground rooms devoid of furnishings except for one chamber in the middle of which sat the Duke’s commode. The main hall was mysteriously floor less. Most of the rooms were painted pink.
BILL BRYSON

Chamber Dark Dukes Men
I understand cricket – what’s going on, the scoring – but I can’t understand why.
BILL BRYSON

Cricket Scoring Understand
You can be a scientist and believe in god: the two can go hand in hand.
BILL BRYSON

Believe Hands Scientist
Even though sugar was very expensive, people consumed it till their teeth turned black, and if their teeth didn’t turn black naturally, they blackened them artificially to show how wealthy and marvelously self-indulgent they were.
BILL BRYSON

Black People Self

Britain still has the most reliably beautiful countryside of anywhere in the world. I would hate to be part of the generation that allowed that to be lost.

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Britain still has the most reliably beautiful countryside of anywhere in the world. I would hate to be part of the generation that allowed that to be lost.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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