Des Moines is a mecca of cosmopolitanism, a dynamic hub of wealth and education, where people wear three-piece suits and dark socks, often simultaneously.
BILL BRYSONYou don’t have to know anything about baseball to respond to Babe Ruth because he’s just this magnificent human being.
More Bill Bryson Quotes
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My favourite fellow of the Royal Society is the Reverend Thomas Bayes, an obscure 18th-century Kent clergyman and a brilliant mathematician who devised a complex equation known as the Bayes theorem, which can be used to work out probability distributions.
BILL BRYSON -
Absolute brain size does not tell you everything or possibly sometimes even much. Elephants and whales both have brains larger than ours, but you wouldn’t have much trouble outwitting them in contract negotiations.
BILL BRYSON -
So that buildings and structures you normally pass without a glance suddenly become arresting, even beautiful? Well, they seem to have that light in Australia nearly all the time.
BILL BRYSON -
Finally, this being America, there is the constant possibility of murder.
BILL BRYSON -
Tune your television to any channel it doesn’t receive and about 1 percent of the dancing static you see is accounted for by this ancient remnant of the Big Bang. The next time you complain that there is nothing on, remember that you can always watch the birth of the universe.
BILL BRYSON -
All the things that are part of your heritage make you British – that makes this country what it is. It’s part of your history. And here, unlike America, it’s still living history.
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 -
Every dog on the face of the earth wants me dead.
BILL BRYSON -
Americans now get in a car. On average the total walking of an American these days – that’s walking of all types: from car to office, from office to car, around the supermarket and shopping malls – adds up to 1.4 miles a week, barely 350 yards a day.
BILL BRYSON -
Indeed, if your pillow is six years old–which is apparently about the average age for a pillow–it has been estimated that one-tenth of its weight will be made up of sloughed skin, living mites, dead mites and mite dung.
BILL BRYSON -
Roads get wider and busier and less friendly to pedestrians. And all of the development based around cars, like big sprawling shopping malls.
BILL BRYSON -
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.
BILL BRYSON -
There is more difference between a zebra and a horse, or between a dolphin and a porpoise, than there is between you and the furry creatures your distant ancestors left behind when they set out to take over the world.
BILL BRYSON -
I see litter as part of a long continuum of anti-social behaviour.
BILL BRYSON -
Suddenly you are five years old again. You can’t read anything, you have only the most rudimentary sense of how things work, you can’t even reliably cross a street without endangering your life. Your whole existence becomes a series of interesting guesses.
BILL BRYSON







