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A billion more each came from Buddha and Genghis Khan and Beethoven, and any other historical figure you care to name.

Bill Bryson

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
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

Community Downtown Iowa
For a long time, I’d been vaguely fascinated by the idea that Charles Lindbergh flew the Atlantic and Babe Ruth hit 60 home runs in the same summer.
BILL BRYSON

Fascinated Home Run Running Summer
Every living thing is an elaboration of a single original plan. As humans we are mere increments – each of us a musty archive of adjustments, adaptations, modifications and providential tinkerings stretching back to 3,8 billion years.
BILL BRYSON

Profound Vegetables Years
In terms of adaptability, humans are pretty amazingly useless.
BILL BRYSON

Adaptability Term Useless
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
South Dakota… is like the world’s first drive-through sensory deprivation chamber.
BILL BRYSON

Deprivation Firsts World
Roads get wider and busier and less friendly to pedestrians. And all of the development based around cars, like big sprawling shopping malls.
BILL BRYSON

Car Friendly Shopping
Energy is liberated matter, matter is energy waiting to happen.
BILL BRYSON

Energy Matter Waiting
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
If this book has a lesson, it is that we are awfully lucky to be here-and by ‘we’ I mean every living thing. To attain any kind of life in this universe of ours appears to be quite an achievement.
BILL BRYSON

Appreciate Book Mean
It’s an unnerving thought that we may be the living universe’s supreme achievement and its worst nightmare simultaneously.
BILL BRYSON

Achievement May T Nightmare Wors
There is no such thing, incidentally, as one kudo.
BILL BRYSON

Incidentally Such Things
But what is life to a lichen ? Yet its impulse to exist, to be, is every bit as strong as ours arguably even stronger. If I were told that I had to spend decades being a furry growth on a rock in the woods, I believe I would lose the will to go on.
BILL BRYSON

Believe Rocks Strong
Language is more fashion than science, and matters of usage, spelling and pronunciation tend to wander around like hemlines.
BILL BRYSON

Fashion Matter Writing
Nearly a quarter of American men were in the Armed forces. The rest were in school, in prison, or were George W. Bush.
BILL BRYSON

Men Prison School

A billion more each came from Buddha and Genghis Khan and Beethoven, and any other historical figure you care to name.

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A billion more each came from Buddha and Genghis Khan and Beethoven, and any other historical figure you care to name.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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