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 BRYSONDistance changes utterly when you take the world on foot. A mile becomes a long way, two miles literally considerable, ten miles whopping, fifty miles at the very limits of conception.
More Bill Bryson Quotes
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Enough to explode with the force of thirty very large hydrogen bombs, assuming you knew how to liberate it and really wished to make a point.
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I must say, so long as the car is not actually moving. However, as soon as you put the car in motion … everything slides off … It can hold nothing that has not been nailed to it. So I ask you: what then is it for?
BILL BRYSON -
I have long known that it is part of God’s plan for me to spend a little time with each of the most stupid people on earth.
BILL BRYSON -
I understand cricket – what’s going on, the scoring – but I can’t understand why.
BILL BRYSON -
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.
BILL BRYSON -
You may find that your parents are the most delightful people, but you don’t want to live with them.
BILL BRYSON -
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 -
Because we humans are big and clever enough to produce and utilize antibiotics and disinfectants, it is easy to convince ourselves that we have banished bacteria to the fringes of existence.
BILL BRYSON -
We live on a planet that has a more or less infinite capacity to surprise. What reasoning person could possibly want it any other way?
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The world, you realize, is enormous in a way that only you and a small community of fellow hikers know. Planetary scale is your little secret.
BILL BRYSON -
That may not be the profoundest of insights to take away from a morning’s outing, but I did get a free doughnut as well, so on balance I guess I’m happy.
BILL BRYSON -
You are going to have a day without even the tiniest of pleasures; you are going to drive across Ohio.
BILL BRYSON -
But that’s the glory of foreign travel, as far as I am concerned. I don’t want to know what people are talking about. 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.
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A cough so robust that I tapped into two new seams of phlegm.
BILL BRYSON -
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