England was full of words I’d never heard before – streaky bacon, short back and sides, Belisha beacon, serviettes, high tea, ice-cream cornet.
BILL BRYSONA belief that no commercial activities must be allowed inside the park, but permitting unrestrained development outside, even though the landscape there may be just as outstanding.
More Bill Bryson Quotes
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“Croissant”: However you choose to pronounce it at home, it is perhaps worth nothing that outside the United States, the closer you can come to saying “kwass-ohn,” the sooner you can expect to be presented with one.
BILL BRYSON -
Energy is liberated matter, matter is energy waiting to happen.
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It is unthinkable to have a British countryside that doesn’t have actual functioning farmers riding tractors, cows in fields, things like that.
BILL BRYSON -
I have a small tattered clipping that I sometimes carry with meand pull out for purposes of privateamusement. It’s a weather forecast from theWestern Daily Mail and it says, in toto: ‘Outlook: Dry and warm, but cooler with some rain.
BILL BRYSON -
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 -
Nearly a quarter of American men were in the Armed forces. The rest were in school, in prison, or were George W. Bush.
BILL BRYSON -
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 -
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 -
For a long time, I’d been vaguely fascinated by the idea that Charles Lindbergh flew the Atlantic and Babe Ruth hit 60 home runs in the same summer.
BILL BRYSON -
I come from Des Moines. Someone had to.
BILL BRYSON -
More than 300 million people in the world speak English and the rest, it sometimes seems, try to.
BILL BRYSON -
English is full of booby traps for the unwary foreigner. Any language where the unassuming word fly signifies an annoying insect, a means of travel, and a critical part of a gentleman’s apparel is clearly asking to be mangled.
BILL BRYSON -
Human beings would split the atom and invent television, nylon, and instant coffee before they could figure out the age of their own planet.
BILL BRYSON -
When you consider it from a human perspective, and clearly it would be difficult for us to do otherwise, life is an odd thing. It couldn’t wait to get going, but then, having gotten going, it seemed in very little hurry to move on.
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Now they are a little like those desperate junkies who have tried every known drug and are finally reduced to mainlining toilet bowl cleanser in an effort to get still higher.
BILL BRYSON