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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

Geologists are never at a loss for paperweights.
BILL BRYSON

Geologist Loss Paperweight
More than 300 million people in the world speak English and the rest, it sometimes seems, try to.
BILL BRYSON

English People Speak Trying
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 real problem you get with humour is that you only have so many kinds of jokes within you, and you mine that vein a lot. This isn’t just common to me; it’s anybody who’s funny.
BILL BRYSON

Common Real Veins
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

Noises Sentences Separate Stream Understand
A third…candidate for Shakespearean authorship was Christopher Marlowe. He was the right age (just two months older than Shakespeare), had the requisite talent, and would certainly have had ample leisure after 1593, assuming he wasn’t too dead to work.
BILL BRYSON

Age Candidate Leisure Two
A tiny bundle of genetic material passed from one living entity to another, and has never stopped moving since. It was the moment of creation for us all.
BILL BRYSON

Another Bundle Creation Material Passed
Every atom you possess has almost certainly passed through several stars and been part of millions of organisms on its way to becoming you.
BILL BRYSON

Names Numbers Stars
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
There is no such thing, incidentally, as one kudo.
BILL BRYSON

Incidentally Such Things
It’s hard not to be kind of pessimistic about human beings generally, because we do tend to mess things up. If you just look at the history of extinctions, we’ve killed off an awful lot of animals – and I don’t think we’re doing a very good job of looking after the planet.
BILL BRYSON

Animal History Human Jobs Pessimistic Thinking
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
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
I mused for a few moments on the question of which was worse, to lead a life so boring that you are easily enchanted, or a life so full of stimulus that you are easily bored.
BILL BRYSON

Bored Boring Moments
Columbus real achievement was managing to cross the ocean successfully in both directions. Though an accomplished enough mariner, he was not terribly good at a great deal else, especially geography, the skill that would seem most vital in an explorer.
BILL BRYSON

Accomplish Discovery Enough Ocean Real
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.
BILL BRYSON

Book First Successful

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.

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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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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