Four times I was honked at for having the temerity to proceed through town without the benefit of metal.
BILL BRYSONFour times I was honked at for having the temerity to proceed through town without the benefit of metal.
BILL BRYSONThe remarkable position in which we find ourselves is that we don’t actually know what we actually know.
BILL BRYSONEvery kid I knew had a father with a little stash of men’s magazines which the father thought was secret and which the kid knew all about.
BILL BRYSONDes Moines is like your typical American city; it’s just these concentric circles of malls, built outward from the city.
BILL BRYSONA sign in the yard of a church next door said CHRIST IS THE ANSWER. (The question, of course, is: What do you say when you strike your thumb with a hammer?)
BILL BRYSONA 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.
BILL BRYSONIt 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 BRYSONThat’s the trouble with losing your mind; by the time it’s gone, it’s too late to get it back.
BILL BRYSONBut here’s an extrememly salient point: we have been chosen, by fate or Providence or whatever you wish to call it. As far as we can tell, we are the best there is.
BILL BRYSONMaking English grammar conform to Latin rules is like asking people to play baseball using the rules of football.
BILL BRYSONEvery atom you possess has almost certainly passed through several stars and been part of millions of organisms on its way to becoming you.
BILL BRYSONAt a conference of sociologists in America in 1977, love was defined as “the cognitive-affective state characterized by intrusive and obsessive fantasizing concerning reciprocity of amorant feelings by the object of the amorance.”.
BILL BRYSONCorrect me if I’m wrong, but you would think that if one nation ought by now to have mastered the science of drainage, Britain would be it.
BILL BRYSONI wanted to see what was out there. All over America today people would be dragging themselves to work, stuck in traffic jams, wreathed in exhaust smoke. I was going for a walk in the woods. I was more than ready for this.
BILL BRYSONYou don’t need a science degree to understand about science. You just need to think about it.
BILL BRYSONThis was 1990, the year that communism died in Europe and it seemed strange to me that in all the words that were written about the fall of the iron curtain, nobody anywhere lamented that it was the end of a noble experiment.
BILL BRYSON