I mused for a few moments on the question of which was worse, to lead a life so boring that you are easily enchanted, or a life so full of stimulus that you are easily bored.
BILL BRYSONBeulah 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.
More Bill Bryson Quotes
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In terms of adaptability, humans are pretty amazingly useless.
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And before long there will be no more milk in bottles delivered to the doorstep or sleepy rural pubs, and the countryside will be mostly shopping centers and theme parks.
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Of all the things I am not very good at, living in the real world is perhaps the most outstanding.
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Ordnance Survey maps, tea and crumpets, summer showers and foggy winter evenings – every bit of it.
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But here’s an extrememly salient point: we have been chosen, by fate or Providence or whatever you wish to call it. As far as we can tell, we are the best there is.
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Your pillow alone may be home to 40 million bed mites. (To them your head is just one large oily bon-bon). And don’t think a clean pillow-case will make a difference…
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Every kid I knew had a father with a little stash of men’s magazines which the father thought was secret and which the kid knew all about.
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There’d never been a more advantageous time to be a criminal in America than during the 13 years of Prohibition.
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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.
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The English invented cricket to make other human endeavors look interesting.
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The tearoom lady called me love. All the shop ladies called me love and most of the men called me mate. I hadn’t been here twelve hours and already they loved me.
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That’s the trouble with losing your mind; by the time it’s gone, it’s too late to get it back.
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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.
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To my mind, the only possible pet is a cow. Cows love you. They will listen to your problems and never ask a thing in return. They will be your friends forever. And when you get tired of them, you can kill and eat them. Perfect.
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When the poet Paul Valery once asked Albert Einstein if he kept a notebook to record his ideas, Einstein looked at him with mild but genuine surprise. “Oh, that’s not necessary,” he replied . “It’s so seldom I have one.
BILL BRYSON







