There’d never been a more advantageous time to be a criminal in America than during the 13 years of Prohibition.
BILL BRYSONThe best that can be said for Norwegian television is that it gives you the sensation of a coma without the worry and inconvenience.
More Bill Bryson Quotes
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To my surprise, I felt a certain springy keenness. I was ready to hike. I had waited months for this day, after all, even if it had been mostly with foreboding.
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You don’t have to know anything about baseball to respond to Babe Ruth because he’s just this magnificent human being.
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In the morning I awoke early and experienced that sinking sensation that overcomes you when you first open your eyes and realize that instead of a normal day ahead of you, with its scatterings of simple gratifications.
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America has never quite grasped that you can live in a place without making it ugly, that beauty doesn’t have to be confined behind fences, as if a national park were a sort of zoo for nature.
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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.
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Suddenly, in the space of a moment, I realized what it was that I loved about Britain – which is to say, all of it.
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Very little of what America does is actually bad, and I don’t think it ever does anything anywhere that is intentionally bad. I mean, sometimes we make mistakes and bad judgments and kind of back the wrong regimes and things, but by and large what America does is really good.
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Language is more fashion than science, and matters of usage, spelling and pronunciation tend to wander around like hemlines.
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The one upstairs room in which the Duke had resided was packed to the ceiling with hundreds of green boxes, each of which contained a single dark brown wig. This was, in short, a man worth getting to know.
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I love everything about motels. I can’t help myself. I still get excited every time I slip a key into a motel room door and fling it open.
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The first book I did – the first successful book – was a kind of a travel book, and publishers in Britain encouraged me to do more.
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It is not as if farming brought a great improvement in living standards either. A typical hunter-gatherer enjoyed a more varied diet and consumed more protein and calories than settled people, and took in five times as much viatmin C as the average person today.
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Why is it, I wondered, that old people are always so self-centered and excitable? But I just smiled benignly and stood back, comforted by the thought that soon they would be dead.
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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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18th century scientists, the French in particular, seldom did things simply if an absurdly demanding alternative was available.
BILL BRYSON