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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

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 used to build civilizations. Now we build shopping malls.
BILL BRYSON

Ass Bad Badass Civilization
Consider the Lichen. Lichens are just about the hardiest visible organisms on Earth, but the least ambitious.
BILL BRYSON

Ambitious Earth Visible
A world without newspapers or a world where the newspapers are purely electronic and you read them on a screen is not a very appealing world.
BILL BRYSON

Newspapers Screens World
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
America is a very seductive place in terms of lifestyle and comfort, but it wasn’t for me.
BILL BRYSON

Comfort Country Seductive
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
Americans now get in a car. On average the total walking of an American these days – that’s walking of all types: from car to office, from office to car, around the supermarket and shopping malls – adds up to 1.4 miles a week, barely 350 yards a day.
BILL BRYSON

Around Average Shopping Supermarket Walking
Des Moines is a mecca of cosmopolitanism, a dynamic hub of wealth and education, where people wear three-piece suits and dark socks, often simultaneously.
BILL BRYSON

Cosmopolitanism Dynamic Simultaneously Socks Suits Wealth
The real problem you get with humour is that you only have so many kinds of jokes within you, and you mine that vein a lot. This isn’t just common to me; it’s anybody who’s funny.
BILL BRYSON

Common Real Veins
My first rule of travel is never to go to a place that sounds like a medical condition and Critz is clearly an incurable disease involving flaking skin.
BILL BRYSON

Judging Skins Travel
It was one of those sumptuous days when the world is full of autumn muskiness and tangy, crisp perfection: vivid blue sky, deep green fields, leaves in a thousand luminous hues. It is a truly astounding sight when every tree in a landscape becomes individual.
BILL BRYSON

Autumn Fields Green Muskiness Sight Sumptuous
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
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

Going Themselves Wanted Wood Work Wreathed
Every atom you possess has almost certainly passed through several stars and been part of millions of organisms on its way to becoming you.
BILL BRYSON

Names Numbers Stars
So, if people didn’t settle down to take up farming, why then did they embark on this entirely new way of living? We have no idea – or actually, we have lots of ideas, but we don’t know if any of them are right.
BILL BRYSON

Beer Eight Powerful

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.

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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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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