Every 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 BRYSONAmong 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?
More Bill Bryson Quotes
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The remarkable position in which we find ourselves is that we don’t actually know what we actually know.
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In a funny way, nothing makes you feel more like a native of your own country than to live where nearly everyone is not.
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If you believe in god, it’s much more fantastic to believe that he created this universe billions of years ago and set in motion this long train of activities that eventually resulted in us. I think that’s so much more satisfying, more thrilling, than the idea that it was all done in seven days.
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Nearly a quarter of American men were in the Armed forces. The rest were in school, in prison, or were George W. Bush.
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Most scientists are without exception adorably quirky, and one of the ways of making it more accessible was to try to get readers interested in the person.
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An awful lot of England is slowly eroding, in ways that I find really distressing, and an awful lot of it is the hedgerows…
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…and it occurred to me, with the forcefulness of a thought experienced in 360 degrees, that that’s really what history mostly is: masses of people doing ordinary things.
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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.
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Christmas tree stands are the work of the devil and they want you dead.
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Finally, this being America, there is the constant possibility of murder.
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We forget just how painfully dim the world was before electricity. A candle, a good candle, provides barely a hundredth of the illumination of a single 100 watt light bulb.
BILL BRYSON -
We are each so atomically numberous and so vigorously recycled at death that a significant number of our atoms-up to a billion for each of us, it has been suggested-probably once belonged to Shakespeare.
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I come from Des Moines. Someone had to.
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Geologists are never at a loss for paperweights.
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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