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.
BILL BRYSONEven though sugar was very expensive, people consumed it till their teeth turned black, and if their teeth didn’t turn black naturally, they blackened them artificially to show how wealthy and marvelously self-indulgent they were.
More Bill Bryson Quotes
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It is a slightly arresting notion that if you were to pick yourself apart with tweezers, one atom at a time, you would produce a mound of fine atomic dust, none of which had ever been alive but all of which had once been you.
BILL BRYSON -
When I was growing up I used to think that the best thing about coming from Des Moines was that it meant you didn’t come from anywhere else in Iowa. By Iowa standards.
BILL BRYSON -
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.
BILL BRYSON -
Not one of your pertinent ancestors was squashed, devoured, drowned, starved, stranded, stuck fast, untimely wounded, or otherwise deflected from its life’s quest of delivering a tiny charge of genetic material to the right partner at the right moment.
BILL BRYSON -
When you tell an Iowan a joke, you can see a kind of race going on between his brain and his expression.
BILL BRYSON -
Enough to explode with the force of thirty very large hydrogen bombs, assuming you knew how to liberate it and really wished to make a point.
BILL BRYSON -
But 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.
BILL BRYSON -
Science has been quite embattled. It’s the most important thing there is. An arts graduate is not going to fix global warming. They may do other valuable things, but they are not going to fix the planet or cure cancer or get rid of malaria.
BILL BRYSON -
I tell the kids that, even in a childhood marked by despair and deprivation, I knew that no matter what happened,
BILL BRYSON -
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 -
Geologists are never at a loss for paperweights.
BILL BRYSON -
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 BRYSON -
I love the feeling of being anonymous in a city I’ve never been before.
BILL BRYSON -
Everything that has ever lived, plant or animal, dates its beginning from the same primordial twitch. At some point in an unimaginably distant past, some little bag of chemicals fidgeted to life. It absorbed some nutrients, gently pulsed, had a brief existence.
BILL BRYSON -
The people are immensely likable- cheerful, extrovert, quick-witted, and unfailingly obliging. Their cities are safe and clean and nearly always built on water. They have a society that is prosperous, well ordered, and instinctively egalitarian.
BILL BRYSON