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 BRYSONBut that’s the glory of foreign travel, as far as I am concerned. I don’t want to know what people are talking about. 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.
More Bill Bryson Quotes
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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.
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A belief that no commercial activities must be allowed inside the park, but permitting unrestrained development outside, even though the landscape there may be just as outstanding.
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If a potato can produce vitamin C, why can’t we? Within the animal kingdom only humans and guinea pigs are unable to synthesize vitamin C in their own bodies. Why us and guinea pigs? No point asking. Nobody knows.
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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 -
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?
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The tearoom lady called me love. All the shop ladies called me love and most of the men called me mate. I hadn’t been here twelve hours and already they loved me.
BILL BRYSON -
Consider the Lichen. Lichens are just about the hardiest visible organisms on Earth, but the least ambitious.
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The best that can be said for Norwegian television is that it gives you the sensation of a coma without the worry and inconvenience.
BILL BRYSON -
A billion more each came from Buddha and Genghis Khan and Beethoven, and any other historical figure you care to name.
BILL BRYSON -
The remarkable position in which we find ourselves is that we don’t actually know what we actually know.
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.
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That’s the trouble with losing your mind; by the time it’s gone, it’s too late to get it back.
BILL BRYSON -
In three minutes, 98 percent of all the matter there is or will ever be has been produced. We have a universe
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At a stroke, the American government closed down the fifth largest industry in the United States – alcohol production – and just handed it to criminals – a pretty remarkable thing to do.
BILL BRYSON -
18th century scientists, the French in particular, seldom did things simply if an absurdly demanding alternative was available.
BILL BRYSON