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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.

Bill Bryson

Every dog on the face of the earth wants me dead.
BILL BRYSON

Dog Earth Want
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 can’t think of anything that excites a greater sense of childlike wonder than to be in a country where you are ignorant of almost everything.
BILL BRYSON

Country Funny Inspirational
18th century scientists, the French in particular, seldom did things simply if an absurdly demanding alternative was available.
BILL BRYSON

Alternatives Century Scientist
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.
BILL BRYSON

Commercial Development Outside Outstanding Permitting
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.
BILL BRYSON

Cross Rudimentary Street Suddenly Things Work
Traveling makes you realize what an immeasurably nice place much of America could be if only people possessed the same instinct for preservation as they do in Europe.
BILL BRYSON

Europe Nice Travel
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.
BILL BRYSON

Boxes Getting Hundred Mna Upstair Worth
Columbus real achievement was managing to cross the ocean successfully in both directions. Though an accomplished enough mariner, he was not terribly good at a great deal else, especially geography, the skill that would seem most vital in an explorer.
BILL BRYSON

Accomplish Discovery Enough Ocean Real
Of all the things I am not very good at, living in the real world is perhaps the most outstanding.
BILL BRYSON

Advice Good Real World
There are things you just can’t do in life. You can’t beat the phone company, you can’t make a waiter see you until he’s ready to see you, and you can’t go home again.
BILL BRYSON

Home House Phones
I always wanted to do a baseball book; I love baseball. The problem is that a very large part of my following is in non-baseball playing countries.
BILL BRYSON

Baseball Book Country Problem
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

Animal Moving Past Same
Because time moves more slowly in Kid World … it goes on for decades … It is adult life that is over in a twinkling.
BILL BRYSON

Adults Kids Moving
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
It isn’t easy to become a fossil. … Only about one bone in a billion, it is thought, becomes fossilized. If that is so, it means that the complete fossil legacy of all the Americans alive today.
BILL BRYSON

Mean Science Skeletons

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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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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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