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To understand what anyone is saying to us we must separate these noises into words and the words into sentences so that we might in our turn issue a stream of mixed sounds in response.

Bill Bryson

The one thing we have in common with all other living things is that for nearly four billions years our ancestors have managed to slip through a series of closing doors every time we needed them to.
BILL BRYSON

Billion Closing Common Doors Managed Thing Years
In a funny way, nothing makes you feel more like a native of your own country than to live where nearly everyone is not.
BILL BRYSON

Country Feels Way
Everything seems to be designed for the benefit of the automobile and not the benefit of the human being.
BILL BRYSON

Automobile Being Everything Human
Everywhere throughout New England you find old, tumbledown field walls, often in the middle of the deepest, most settled- looking woods- a reminder of just how swiftly nature reclaims the land in America.
BILL BRYSON

Country Deepest Land Look Wall
In terms of adaptability, humans are pretty amazingly useless.
BILL BRYSON

Adaptability Term Useless
The great failure in education, much of the time, is the lack of excitement and stimulus
BILL BRYSON

Education Excitement Lack Stimulus
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
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.
BILL BRYSON

Distance Law Stars
More than 300 million people in the world speak English and the rest, it sometimes seems, try to.
BILL BRYSON

English People Speak Trying
It’s hard not to be kind of pessimistic about human beings generally, because we do tend to mess things up. If you just look at the history of extinctions, we’ve killed off an awful lot of animals – and I don’t think we’re doing a very good job of looking after the planet.
BILL BRYSON

Animal History Human Jobs Pessimistic Thinking
I had spent the whole of my savings … on a suit for the wedding – a remarkable piece of apparel with lapels that had been modelled on the tail fins of a 1957 Coupe de Ville and trousers so copiously flared that when I walked you didn’t see my legs move.
BILL BRYSON

Fashion Moving Pieces
Protons give an atom its identity, electrons its personality.
BILL BRYSON

Giving Identity Personality
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.
BILL BRYSON

Chosen Far Providence Whatever Wish
When each winding back highway and plump hillside is suddenly and infinitely splashed with every sharp shade that nature can bestow – flaming scarlet, lustrous gold, throbbing vermilion, fiery orange.
BILL BRYSON

Bestow Hobbing Nature Orange Shade Vermilion
Traveling makes you realize what an immeasurably nice place much of America could be if only people possessed the same instinct for preservation as they do in Europe.
BILL BRYSON

Europe Nice Travel
There is no reason why we shouldn’t be able to split an infinitive, any more than we should forsake instant coffee and air travel because they weren’t available to the Romans.
BILL BRYSON

Air Coffee Country Language Splits

To understand what anyone is saying to us we must separate these noises into words and the words into sentences so that we might in our turn issue a stream of mixed sounds in response.

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To understand what anyone is saying to us we must separate these noises into words and the words into sentences so that we might in our turn issue a stream of mixed sounds in response.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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