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Even 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.

Bill Bryson

Romans park their cars the way I would park if I had just spilled a beaker of hydrochloric acid on my lap.
BILL BRYSON

Car Hydrochloric Lap Way
But I got a great deal else from the experience. I learned to pitch a tent and sleep beneath the stars. For a brief, proud period I was slender and fit. I gained a profound respect for the wilderness and nature and the benign dark power of woods.
BILL BRYSON

Beneath Gained Home Sleep Stars
If you were designing an organism to look after life in our lonely cosmos, to monitor where it is going and keep a record of where it has been, you wouldn’t choose human beings for the job.
BILL BRYSON

Fate Jobs Lonely
I don’t know whether I’m misanthropic. It seems to me I’m constantly disappointed. I’m very easily disappointed. Disappointed in the things that people do; disappointed in the things that people construct. I want things to be better all the time.
BILL BRYSON

Disappointed Misanthropic People Time Want
What is it about maps? I could look at them all day, earnestly studying the names of towns and villages I have never heard of and will never visit.
BILL BRYSON

Looks Names Travel
Finally, this being America, there is the constant possibility of murder.
BILL BRYSON

Country Murder Possibility
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

Assume Bombs Enough Explode Liberate
Absolute brain size does not tell you everything or possibly sometimes even much. Elephants and whales both have brains larger than ours, but you wouldn’t have much trouble outwitting them in contract negotiations.
BILL BRYSON

Brain Elephants Whales
I must say, so long as the car is not actually moving. However, as soon as you put the car in motion … everything slides off … It can hold nothing that has not been nailed to it. So I ask you: what then is it for?
BILL BRYSON

Actually Ask Motion Must Nailed Say Soon
America has never quite grasped that you can live in a place without making it ugly, that beauty doesn’t have to be confined behind fences, as if a national park were a sort of zoo for nature.
BILL BRYSON

Beauty Behind Country Fences Grasped Making Nature
Traveling makes you realize what an immeasurably nice place much of America could be if only people possessed the same instinct for preservation as they do in Europe.
BILL BRYSON

Europe Nice Travel
… it occurred to me that never again would he be seven years, one month and six days old, so we had better catch these moments while we can.
BILL BRYSON

Months Six Years
As humans we are doubly lucky, of course: We enjoy not only the privilege of existence but also the singular ability to appreciate it and even, in a multitude of ways, to make it better. It is a talent we have only barely begun to grasp.
BILL BRYSON

Ability Existence Human Multitude Privilege Singular
America is a great disappointment to me. As I said in one of my books, other societies create civilisations; we build shopping malls.
BILL BRYSON

Book Disappointment Shopping
In three minutes, 98 percent of all the matter there is or will ever be has been produced. We have a universe
BILL BRYSON

Matter Minutes Three
You can be a scientist and believe in god: the two can go hand in hand.
BILL BRYSON

Believe Hands Scientist
There is the odd exception, like Albert Einstein, but as a breed, scientists tend not be very good at presenting themselves.
BILL BRYSON

Odd Scientist Very Good
“Croissant”: However you choose to pronounce it at home, it is perhaps worth nothing that outside the United States, the closer you can come to saying “kwass-ohn,” the sooner you can expect to be presented with one.
BILL BRYSON

Croissants Home United States
We used to build civilizations. Now we build shopping malls.
BILL BRYSON

Ass Bad Badass Civilization
There is more difference between a zebra and a horse, or between a dolphin and a porpoise, than there is between you and the furry creatures your distant ancestors left behind when they set out to take over the world.
BILL BRYSON

Differences Horse Zebras
Boston’s freeway system is insane. It was clearly designed by a person who had spent his childhood crashing toy trains.
BILL BRYSON

Boston Childhood Insane
When you sit in a chair, you are not actually sitting there, but levitating above it at a height of one angstrom (a hundred millionth of a centimetre), your electrons and its electrons implacably opposed to any closer intimacy.
BILL BRYSON

Angstrom Height Intimacy Levitating Sitting
Your pillow alone may be home to 40 million bed mites. (To them your head is just one large oily bon-bon). And don’t think a clean pillow-case will make a difference…
BILL BRYSON

Average Home Thinking
A tiny bundle of genetic material passed from one living entity to another, and has never stopped moving since. It was the moment of creation for us all.
BILL BRYSON

Another Bundle Creation Material Passed
I had spent the whole of my savings … on a suit for the wedding – a remarkable piece of apparel with lapels that had been modelled on the tail fins of a 1957 Coupe de Ville and trousers so copiously flared that when I walked you didn’t see my legs move.
BILL BRYSON

Fashion Moving Pieces
That’s 270 million people with 206 bones each – will only be about 50 bones, one-quarter of a complete skeleton. That’s not to say, of course, that any of these bones will ever actually be found.
BILL BRYSON

Actually Bones Complete Course Each Million People
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

Even 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.

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Even 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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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