It had no practical application in his lifetime, but today, thanks to computers, is routinely used in the modelling of climate change, astrophysics and stock-market analysis.
BILL BRYSONThere seemed to be a mystifying universal conspiracy among textbook authors to make certain the material they dealt with never strayed too near the realm of the mildly interesting and was always at least a long-distance phone call from the frankly interesting.
More Bill Bryson Quotes
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I love everything about motels. I can’t help myself. I still get excited every time I slip a key into a motel room door and fling it open.
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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.
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Perhaps it’s my natural pessimism, but it seems that an awfully large part of travel these days is to see things while you still can.
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There are things you just can’t do in life. You can’t beat the phone company, you can’t make a waiter see you until he’s ready to see you, and you can’t go home again.
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You don’t need a science degree to understand about science. You just need to think about it.
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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.
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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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I mused for a few moments on the question of which was worse, to lead a life so boring that you are easily enchanted, or a life so full of stimulus that you are easily bored.
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I know that communism never worked and I would have disliked living under it myself but none the less it seems that there was a kind of sadness in the thought that the only economic system that appeared to work was one based on self interest and greed.
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To me, the greatest invention of my lifetime is the laptop computer and the fact that I can be working on a book and be in an airport lounge, in a hotel room, and continue working; I fire up my laptop, and I’m in exactly the same place I was when I left home – that, to me, is a miracle.
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The tearoom lady called me love. All the shop ladies called me love and most of the men called me mate. I hadn’t been here twelve hours and already they loved me.
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America is a great disappointment to me. As I said in one of my books, other societies create civilisations; we build shopping malls.
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There is always a little more toothpaste in the tube. Think about it.
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I think it’s only right that crazy people should have their own city, but I cannot for the life of me see why a sane person would want to go there.
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I always wanted to do a baseball book; I love baseball. The problem is that a very large part of my following is in non-baseball playing countries.
BILL BRYSON