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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

Why is it, I wondered, that old people are always so self-centered and excitable? But I just smiled benignly and stood back, comforted by the thought that soon they would be dead.
BILL BRYSON

Excitable People Self Wondered
People don’t talk like this, theytalklikethis. Syllables, words, sentences run together like a watercolour left in the rain.
BILL BRYSON

Issues Rain Running
Geologists are never at a loss for paperweights.
BILL BRYSON

Geologist Loss Paperweight
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
From an evolutionary point of view, sex is really just a reward mechanism to encourage us to pass on our genetic material.
BILL BRYSON

Rewards Sex Views
In order to perpetuate the only possible sequence of hereditary combinations that could result — eventually, astoundingly, and all too briefly — in you.
BILL BRYSON

Astoundingly Briefly Combination Result
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
As the saying goes, it takes all kinds to make the world go around, though perhaps some shouldn’t go quite so far around it as others.
BILL BRYSON

Kind Life World
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
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
I wanted to quit and to do this forever, sleep in a bed and in a tent, see what was over the next hill and never see a hill again. All of this all at once, every moment, on the trail or off.
BILL BRYSON

Bed Forever Sleep
Where I grew up, in Des Moines, Iowa, there is hardly any downtown economic activity now. Everybody shops in malls – you don’t find a sense of community in malls.
BILL BRYSON

Community Downtown Iowa
Des Moines is like your typical American city; it’s just these concentric circles of malls, built outward from the city.
BILL BRYSON

Circles Cities Typical
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

Beautiful Generations Hate
If you were designing an organism to look after life in our lonely cosmos, to monitor where it is going and keep a record of where it has been, you wouldn’t choose human beings for the job.
BILL BRYSON

Fate Jobs Lonely
Physics is really nothing more than a search for ultimate simplicity, but so far all we have is a kind of elegant messiness.
BILL BRYSON

Kind Physics Simplicity

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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