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There are only three things that can kill a farmer: lightning, rolling over in a tractor, and old age.

Bill Bryson

A third…candidate for Shakespearean authorship was Christopher Marlowe. He was the right age (just two months older than Shakespeare), had the requisite talent, and would certainly have had ample leisure after 1593, assuming he wasn’t too dead to work.
BILL BRYSON

Age Candidate Leisure Two
Time, you discover, has wrought changes that leave you feeling mildly foolish and out of touch.
BILL BRYSON

Discover Feeling Leave Touch
…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.
BILL BRYSON

Degree Ordinary People
It is unthinkable to have a British countryside that doesn’t have actual functioning farmers riding tractors, cows in fields, things like that.
BILL BRYSON

Cows Fields Riding
Everything seems to be designed for the benefit of the automobile and not the benefit of the human being.
BILL BRYSON

Automobile Being Everything Human
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
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
Cheapness is a great virtue.
BILL BRYSON

Cheapness Great Virtue
People don’t talk like this, theytalklikethis. Syllables, words, sentences run together like a watercolour left in the rain.
BILL BRYSON

Issues Rain Running
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.
BILL BRYSON

Book Fire Home Laptop Miracle Place
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
It is a curious feature of our existance that we come from a planet that is very good at promoting life but even better at extinguishing it.
BILL BRYSON

Curious Good Planets Promoting Very
When the Duke [W.J.C. Scott-Bentinck] died, his heirs found all of the aboveground rooms devoid of furnishings except for one chamber in the middle of which sat the Duke’s commode. The main hall was mysteriously floor less. Most of the rooms were painted pink.
BILL BRYSON

Chamber Dark Dukes Men
The great failure in education, much of the time, is the lack of excitement and stimulus
BILL BRYSON

Education Excitement Lack Stimulus
Those who sniff decay in every shift of sense or alteration of usage do the language no service. Too often for such people the notion of good English has less to do with expressing ideas clearly than with making words conform to some arbitrary pattern.
BILL BRYSON

Decay Ideas People Usage Writing
Energy is liberated matter, matter is energy waiting to happen.
BILL BRYSON

Energy Matter Waiting

There are only three things that can kill a farmer: lightning, rolling over in a tractor, and old age.

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There are only three things that can kill a farmer: lightning, rolling over in a tractor, and old age.

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