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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

There seemed to be a mystifying universal conspiracy among textbook authors to make certain the material they dealt with never strayed too near the realm of the mildly interesting and was always at least a long-distance phone call from the frankly interesting.
BILL BRYSON

Distance Long Phones
They make you feel small & confused & vulnerable, like a small child lost in a crowd of strange legs. Stand in a desert or prairie & you know you are in a big space. Stand in the woods and you only sense it. They are vast, featureless nowhere. And they are alive.
BILL BRYSON

Confuse Crowd Feel Smart Space Stand
We are so used to the notion of our own inevitability as life’s dominant species that it is hard to grasp that we are here only because of timely extraterrestrial bangs and other random flukes.
BILL BRYSON

Doors Four Years
Among the errors cited in this book are a number committed by some of the leading authorities of this century. If men such as Fowler and Bernstein and Quirk and Howard cannot always get their English right, is it reasonable to expect the rest of us to?
BILL BRYSON

Among Books Century Cities Critics Flower Leading Some
Yes, U.S. travelers dress better. The British are always so conspicuous in hot climates. They don’t seem to wear shorts. American men seem to be comfortable wearing hot-weather clothing.
BILL BRYSON

Climate Men Weather
In the morning I awoke early and experienced that sinking sensation that overcomes you when you first open your eyes and realize that instead of a normal day ahead of you, with its scatterings of simple gratifications.
BILL BRYSON

Eye Morning Simple
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.
BILL BRYSON

Appreciate Book Mean
Perhaps it’s my natural pessimism, but it seems that an awfully large part of travel these days is to see things while you still can.
BILL BRYSON

Memorable Pessimism Travel
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
Beulah has a husband?’ I know. It’s a miracle. There can’t be more than two people on the planet who’d be willing to sleep with her, and here we are both in the same town.
BILL BRYSON

Husband Sleep Two
Most of what has lived on Earth has left behind no record at all.
BILL BRYSON

Earth Left Behind Records
In terms of adaptability, humans are pretty amazingly useless.
BILL BRYSON

Adaptability Term Useless
I don’t know whether I’m misanthropic. It seems to me I’m constantly disappointed. I’m very easily disappointed. Disappointed in the things that people do; disappointed in the things that people construct. I want things to be better all the time.
BILL BRYSON

Disappointed Misanthropic People Time Want
A billion more each came from Buddha and Genghis Khan and Beethoven, and any other historical figure you care to name.
BILL BRYSON

Billion Buddha Name
Now they are a little like those desperate junkies who have tried every known drug and are finally reduced to mainlining toilet bowl cleanser in an effort to get still higher.
BILL BRYSON

Desperate Higher Known Maintaining Reduced Tried
It’s an unnerving thought that we may be the living universe’s supreme achievement and its worst nightmare simultaneously.
BILL BRYSON

Achievement May T Nightmare Wors

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.

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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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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