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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 Bryson

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 BRYSON

Mean Science Skeletons
The food is excellent. The beer is cold. The sun nearly always shines. There is coffee on every corner. Life doesn’t get much better than this.
BILL BRYSON

Always Better Excellent Food Shines
I still enjoy traveling a lot. I mean, it amazes me that I still get excited in hotel rooms just to see what kind of shampoo they’ve left me.
BILL BRYSON

Kind Mean Rooms
I can wear a baseball cap; I am entitled to wear a baseball cap. I am genetically pre-disposed to wear a baseball cap, whereas most English people look wrong in a baseball cap.
BILL BRYSON

Baseball Cap Looks People Wear
…and it occurred to me, with the forcefulness of a thought experienced in 360 degrees, that that’s really what history mostly is: masses of people doing ordinary things.
BILL BRYSON

Degree Ordinary People
More than 300 million people in the world speak English and the rest, it sometimes seems, try to.
BILL BRYSON

English People Speak Trying
Most of what has lived on Earth has left behind no record at all.
BILL BRYSON

Earth Left Behind Records
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

Country Heritage History Thing
If you drive to, say, Shenandoah National Park, or the Great Smoky Mountains, you’ll get some appreciation for the scale and beauty of the outdoors.
BILL BRYSON

Appreciation Gratitude Mountain
They make you feel small & confused & vulnerable, like a small child lost in a crowd of strange legs. Stand in a desert or prairie & you know you are in a big space. Stand in the woods and you only sense it. They are vast, featureless nowhere. And they are alive.
BILL BRYSON

Confuse Crowd Feel Smart Space Stand
Life just wants to be; but it doesn’t want to be much.
BILL BRYSON

Life Want Wonderful
If this book has a lesson, it is that we are awfully lucky to be here-and by ‘we’ I mean every living thing. To attain any kind of life in this universe of ours appears to be quite an achievement.
BILL BRYSON

Appreciate Book Mean
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

Enormous Realize Scale Secret Way
I tell the kids that, even in a childhood marked by despair and deprivation, I knew that no matter what happened,
BILL BRYSON

Childhood Deprivation Divorce Kids
We may be all there is. It’s an unnerving thought that we may be the living universe’s supreme achievement and its worst nightmare simultaneously.
BILL BRYSON

Achievement Nightmare Simultaneously Worst
The lesson to draw from this, of course, is that when you move from one country to another you have to accept that there are some things that are better and some things worse, and there is nothing you can do about it.
BILL BRYSON

Accept Country Lesson Nothing Same Thing

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.

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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.

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Popular Authors

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