There is the odd exception, like Albert Einstein, but as a breed, scientists tend not be very good at presenting themselves.
BILL BRYSONEngland was full of words I’d never heard before – streaky bacon, short back and sides, Belisha beacon, serviettes, high tea, ice-cream cornet.
More Bill Bryson Quotes
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Nearly a quarter of American men were in the Armed forces. The rest were in school, in prison, or were George W. Bush.
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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.
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The upshot of all this is that we live in a universe whose age we can’t quite compute, surrounded by stars whose distances we don’t altogether know, filled with matter we can’t identify, operating in conformance with physical laws whose properties we don’t truly understand.
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Take a moment from time to time to remember that you are alive. I know this sounds a trifle obvious, but it is amazing how little time we take to remark upon this singular and gratifying fact.
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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.
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You may not feel outstandingly robust, but if you are an average-sized adult you will contain within your modest frame no less than 7 X 10^18 joules of potential energy.
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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.
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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.
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The human diet consists of just nine plants: corn, rice, wheat, potatoes, cassava, sorghum, millet, beans, barley, rye and oats.
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People don’t talk like this, theytalklikethis. Syllables, words, sentences run together like a watercolour left in the rain.
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I have a small tattered clipping that I sometimes carry with meand pull out for purposes of privateamusement. It’s a weather forecast from theWestern Daily Mail and it says, in toto: ‘Outlook: Dry and warm, but cooler with some rain.
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The great failure in education, much of the time, is the lack of excitement and stimulus
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Absolute brain size does not tell you everything or possibly sometimes even much. Elephants and whales both have brains larger than ours, but you wouldn’t have much trouble outwitting them in contract negotiations.
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I don’t know whether I’m misanthropic. It seems to me I’m constantly disappointed. I’m very easily disappointed.
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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