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Christmas tree stands are the work of the devil and they want you dead.

Bill Bryson

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
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
I love the feeling of being anonymous in a city I’ve never been before.
BILL BRYSON

Anonymous Cities Feelings Travel
More than 300 million people in the world speak English and the rest, it sometimes seems, try to.
BILL BRYSON

English People Speak Trying
From an evolutionary point of view, sex is really just a reward mechanism to encourage us to pass on our genetic material.
BILL BRYSON

Rewards Sex Views
To my mind, the only possible pet is a cow. Cows love you. They will listen to your problems and never ask a thing in return. They will be your friends forever. And when you get tired of them, you can kill and eat them. Perfect.
BILL BRYSON

Love You Perfect Tired
Physics is really nothing more than a search for ultimate simplicity, but so far all we have is a kind of elegant messiness.
BILL BRYSON

Kind Physics Simplicity
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

Cows Fields Riding
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.
BILL BRYSON

Average Consumed People Protein Today Typical
By the most astounding stroke of luck an infinitesimal portion of all the matter in the universe came together to create you and for the tiniest moment in the great span of eternity you have the incomparable privilege to exist.
BILL BRYSON

Eternity Moment Time Together Universe
The remarkable position in which we find ourselves is that we don’t actually know what we actually know.
BILL BRYSON

Knows Position Remarkable
On the dashboard of our family car is a shallow indentation about the size of a paperback book. If you are looking for somewhere to put your sunglasses or spare change, it is the obvious place, and it works extremely well,
BILL BRYSON

Book Car Dashboard Family Long Moving
Christmas tree stands are the work of the devil and they want you dead.
BILL BRYSON

Devil Tree Want
People don’t talk like this, theytalklikethis. Syllables, words, sentences run together like a watercolour left in the rain.
BILL BRYSON

Issues Rain Running
You don’t need a science degree to understand about science. You just need to think about it.
BILL BRYSON

Science Thinking Understanding
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
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

Country Funny Inspirational
If you can imagine a man having a vasectomy without anesthetic to the sound of frantic sitar-playing, you will have some idea of what popular Turkish music is like.
BILL BRYSON

Frantic Idea Ideas Men Sound Vasectomy
America is a great disappointment to me. As I said in one of my books, other societies create civilisations; we build shopping malls.
BILL BRYSON

Book Disappointment Shopping
Every last bit of it, good and bad – old churches, country lanes, people saying ‘Mustn’t grumble,’ and ‘I’m terribly sorry but,’ people apologizing to ME when I conk them with a careless elbow, milk in bottles, beans on toast, haymaking in June, seaside piers.
BILL BRYSON

Apologizing Church Every Grumble Last Old People
Distance changes utterly when you take the world on foot. A mile becomes a long way, two miles literally considerable, ten miles whopping, fifty miles at the very limits of conception.
BILL BRYSON

Distance Feet Two
In the countryside, litter doesn’t have a friend. It doesn’t have anybody who’s saying, ‘Wait a minute, this is really starting to get out of control.’
BILL BRYSON

Control Minutes Starting Waiting
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.
BILL BRYSON

Moving Otherwise Perspective Wait Waiting
We live on a planet that has a more or less infinite capacity to surprise. What reasoning person could possibly want it any other way?
BILL BRYSON

Frustrating Infinite Live Person Possibly
Life just wants to be; but it doesn’t want to be much.
BILL BRYSON

Life Want Wonderful
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
Among the errors cited in this book are a number committed by some of the leading authorities of this century. If men such as Fowler and Bernstein and Quirk and Howard cannot always get their English right, is it reasonable to expect the rest of us to?
BILL BRYSON

Among Books Century Cities Critics Flower Leading Some

Christmas tree stands are the work of the devil and they want you dead.

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Christmas tree stands are the work of the devil and they want you dead.

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