Explore the most impactful and insightful quotes and sayings by Bill Bryson, and enrich your perspective with the wisdom. Share these inspiring Bill Bryson quotes pictures with your friends on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, or your personal blogs, completely free. Here are the top 702 Bill Bryson quotes for you to read and share.

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pharmaceutical industry hasn't given us an entirely new antibiotic since the 1970s. Our -- Bill Bryson
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In 1856, shortly before his death, Lord Ellesmere gave the painting to the new National Portrait Gallery in London as its founding work. As the gallery's first acquisition, it has a certain sentimental prestige, but almost at once its authenticity was doubted. -- Bill Bryson
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The proportions of these salts and minerals in our tissues are uncannily similar to those in sea water - we sweat and cry sea water, as Margulis and Sagan have put it - but curiously we cannot tolerate them as an input. -- Bill Bryson
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In his secretiveness he didn't merely resemble Newton, but actively exceeded him. -- Bill Bryson
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Rome was as wonderful as I had hoped it would be, certainly a step up from Peoria. -- Bill Bryson
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If you could fly backwards into the past at the rate of one year per second, it would take you about half an hour to reach the time of Christ, and a little over three weeks to get back to the beginnings of human life. But it would take you twenty years to reach the dawn of the Cambrian period. -- Bill Bryson
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In 1927, if you were stuck with idle time, reading is what you did. It's no accident that the 'Book-of-the-Month Club' and 'The Literary Guild' were founded in that period as well as a lot of magazines, like 'Reader's Digest,' 'Time,' and 'The New Yorker.' -- Bill Bryson
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The whole system was based upon getting kids to a certain standard and packing their minds with information so they could go on to a good university ... The great failure in education, much of the time, is a lack of excitement and stimulus. -- Bill Bryson
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They are, reluctantly or enthusiastically, accepting the idea that humans are as much an accident of nature as a product of orderly development. But -- Bill Bryson
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More than 300 million people in the world speak English and the rest, it sometimes seems, try to. -- Bill Bryson
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Norfolk specializes in odd pronunciations. Hautbois is hobbiss, Wymondham is windum, Costessey is cozzy, Postwick is pozzik. People often ask why that is. I'm not sure, but I think it is just something that happens when you sleep with close relatives. -- Bill Bryson
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One of the hardest ideas for humans to accept,' he says, 'is that we are not the culmination of anything. There is nothing inevitable about our being here. It is part of our vanity as humans that we tend to think of evolution as a process that, in effect, was programmed to produce us. -- Bill Bryson
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The greatest possible irony would be if in our endless quest to fill our lives with comfort and happiness we created a world that had neither. -- Bill Bryson
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There's something satisfying, I think,' Evans said, 'about the idea of light travelling for millions of years through space and just at the right moment as it reaches Earth someone looks at the right bit of sky and sees it. It just seems right that an event of that magnitude should be witnessed. -- Bill Bryson
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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. -- Bill Bryson
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Is it raining out?' the reception girl asked brightly as I filled in the registration card between sneezes and pauses to wipe water from my face with the back of my arm. 'No, my ship sank and I had to swim the last seven miles. -- Bill Bryson
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Very little of what America does is actually bad, and I don't think it ever does anything anywhere that is intentionally bad. I mean, sometimes we make mistakes and bad judgments and kind of back the wrong regimes and things, but by and large what America does is really good. -- Bill Bryson
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There 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. -- Bill Bryson
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Before this dumping was halted in the 1990s, the United States had dumped many hundreds of thousands of drums into about fifty ocean sites - almost fifty thousand of them in the Fallarones alone. -- Bill Bryson
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Anning would spend the next thirty-five years gathering fossils, which she sold to visitors. (She is commonly held to be the source for the famous tongue twister "She sells seashells on the seashore.") -- Bill Bryson
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The whole of the global economy is based on supplying the cravings of two per cent of the world's population. -- Bill Bryson
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Human memories are short and inaccurate. -- Bill Bryson
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Bulgaria, I reflected as I walked back to the hotel, isn't a country; it's a near-death experience. -- Bill Bryson
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Comets develop their distinctive tails when their surface material begins to evaporate as they approach the Sun. -- Bill Bryson
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We used to build civilizations. Now we build shopping malls. -- Bill Bryson
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Perhaps nothing speaks more eloquently of the variability of spelling in the age than the fact that a dictionary published in 1604, A Table Alphabeticall of Hard Words, spelled "words" two ways on the title page. -- Bill Bryson
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The taipan is the one to watch out for. It is the most poisonous snake on Earth, with a lunge so swift and a venom so potent that your last mortal utterance is likely to be: I say, is that a sn
-- Bill Bryson
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Perforated eardrums were quite common16, too; but, as Haldane reassuringly noted in one of his essays, 'the drum generally heals up; and if a hole remains in it, although one is somewhat deaf, one can blow tobacco smoke out of the ear in question, which is a social accomplishment. -- Bill Bryson
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It's hard not to be kind of pessimistic about human beings generally, because we do tend to mess things up. If you just look at the history of extinctions, we've killed off an awful lot of animals - and I don't think we're doing a very good job of looking after the planet. -- Bill Bryson
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I'm not funny in person. I mean I'm really not. I'm one of those people who always screw up anecdotes. -- Bill Bryson
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Elizabethans were as free with their handwriting as they were with their spelling. Handbooks of handwriting suggested up to twenty different - often very different - ways of shaping particular letters. -- Bill Bryson
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Cressbrook Mill was operated mostly by orphans who were treated worse than abysmally. -- Bill Bryson
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I have long known that it is part of God's plan for me to spend a little time with each of the most stupid people on earth, and Mary Ellen was proof that even in the Appalachian woods I would not be spared. It became evident that she was a rarity. -- Bill Bryson
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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
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It was so bad, it was worth more than we paid. -- Bill Bryson
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If all the ice sheets melted, sea levels would rise by 60 metres - the height of a twenty-storey building - and every coastal city in the world would be inundated. -- Bill Bryson
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Noting the lack of crime or security in the Netherlands, the author asked a native who guarded a national landmark. He got the replay, We all do. -- Bill Bryson
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There is actually a certain value in not finding anything,' he said. 'It helps cosmologists to work out the rate at which galaxies are evolving. It's one of those rare areas where the absence of evidence is evidence. -- Bill Bryson
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WIMPs (for Weakly Interacting Massive Particles, which is to say specks of invisible matter left over from the Big -- Bill Bryson
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I'm quite certain that if the rest of the world vanished overnight and the development of cricket were left in Australian hands, within a generation, the players would be wearing shorts and using the bats to hit each other, and the thing is, it'd be a much better game for it. -- Bill Bryson
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Not every visitor was enchanted. William Morris, the future designer and aesthete, then aged seventeen, was so appalled by what he saw as the exhibition's lack of taste and veneration of excess that he staggered from the building and was sick in the bushes. -- Bill Bryson
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The 1920s was a great time for reading altogether - very possibly the peak decade for reading in American life. Soon it would be overtaken by the passive distractions of radio, but for the moment reading remained most people's principal method for filling idle time. -- Bill Bryson
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Hunters will tell you that a moose is a wily and ferocious forest creature. Nonsense. A moose is a cow drawn by a three-year-old. -- Bill Bryson
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The wind's on the wold And the night is a-cold, And Thames runs chill Twixt mead and hill, But kind and dear Is the old house here, And my heart is warm Midst winter's harm ... -- Bill Bryson
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Sadly, although the source of much enjoyment, Ginger the pig progressed from hunting and killing chickens to lambs and, after a stab at my mother's ankles, was banished to the freezer before she developed a taste for small children. -- Bill Bryson
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I had recently read that 3.7 million Americans, according to a Gallup poll, believed that they had been abducted by aliens at one time or another, so it was clear that my people needed me.
On his move back to America after living in England for twenty years. -- Bill Bryson
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We were idiots really, but awfully happy, too. -- Bill Bryson
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I suppose because I grew up a thousand miles from the sea and missed the great age of passenger liners, I have always been subject to a romantic longing for ocean travel. -- Bill Bryson
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Simeon Potter notes that when James II first saw St. Paul's Cathedral he called it amusing, awful, and artificial, and meant that it was pleasing to look at, deserving of awe, and full of skillful artifice. -- Bill Bryson
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Without his books, Thomas Jefferson could not have been Thomas Jefferson. For someone like him living on a frontier, remote from actual experience, books were vital guides to how life might be lived, and none gave him greater inspiration, satisfaction, -- Bill Bryson
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When guys in camouflage pants and hunting hats sat around in the Four Aces Diner talking about fearsome things done out-of-doors, I would no longer have to feel like such a cupcake. -- Bill Bryson
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I grew up, really, in the days before air conditioning. So I can remember what it was like to be really hot, for instance, and I can remember what it was like when your barber shop and your local stores weren't air conditioned, so it was hot when you went in them and they propped the doors open. -- Bill Bryson
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To my mind, the only possible pet is a cow. Cows love you. They will listen to your problems and never ask a thing in return. They will be your friends forever. And when you get tired of them, you can kill and eat them. Perfect. -- Bill Bryson
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You can get some sense of the immaterial quality of clouds by strolling through fog - which is, after all, nothing more than a cloud that lacks the will to fly. -- Bill Bryson
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English grammar is so complex and confusing for the one very simple reason that its rules and terminology are based on Latin, a language with which it has precious little in common. -- Bill Bryson
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In my experience, the last people you want trying to solve any problem, but especially those involving roads, are highway engineers. They operate from the principle that while no traffic problem can ever truly be solved, it can be spread over a much larger area. -- Bill Bryson
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England was full of words I'd never heard before - streaky bacon, short back and sides, Belisha beacon, serviettes, high tea, ice-cream cornet. -- Bill Bryson
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What it really takes to find particles these days is money and lots of it. There is a curious inverse relationship in modern physics between the tininess of the thing being sought and the scale of the facilities required to do the searching. -- Bill Bryson
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In my day the principal concerns of university students were sex, smoking dope, rioting and learning. Learning was something you did only when the first three weren't available. -- Bill Bryson
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How do migrating birds know which one to follow? What if the lead bird just wants to be alone? -- Bill Bryson
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At one time he [Cornelius Vanderbilt] personally controlled some 10 percent of all the money in circulation in the United States. -- Bill Bryson
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The AT is no longer the longest hiking trail - the Pacific Crest and Continental Divide trails, both out West, are slightly longer - but it will always be the first and greatest. It has a lot of friends. It deserves them. -- Bill Bryson
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Nothing - really, absolutely nothing - says more about Victorian Britain and its capacity for brilliance than that the century's most daring and iconic building was entrusted to a gardener. -- Bill Bryson
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Until almost the 20th century, Central Park was home to a shepherd and a flock of 200 sheep. -- Bill Bryson
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It is a curious feature of our existence that we come from a planet that is very good at promoting life but even better at extinguishing it. The -- Bill Bryson
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Des Moines is like your typical American city; it's just these concentric circles of malls, built outward from the city. -- Bill Bryson
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Nearly every aspect of life was subject to some measure of legal restraint. At a local level, you could be fined for letting your ducks wander in the road, for misappropriating town gravel, for having a guest in your house without a permit from the local bailiff. -- Bill Bryson
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Soon levees up and down the river were popping like buttons off a tight shirt. At Mounds Landing, Mississippi, a hundred black workers, kept at their posts by men with rifles, were swept to oblivion when a levee gave way. The coroner, for reasons unstated, recorded just two deaths. -- Bill Bryson
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In France, a chemist named Pilatre de Rozier tested the flammability of hydrogen by gulping a mouthful and blowing across an open flame, proving at a stroke that hydrogen is indeed explosively combustible and that eyebrows are not necessarily a permanent feature of one's face. -- Bill Bryson
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In answer to the question of why it happened, I offer the modest proposal that our Universe is simply one of those things which happen from time to time. -- Bill Bryson
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What would it be like if we had four years and four months to watch an inescapable doom advancing toward us, knowing that when it finally arrived it would blow the skin right off our bones? -- Bill Bryson
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All the things that are part of your heritage make you British - that makes this country what it is. It's part of your history. And here, unlike America, it's still living history. -- Bill Bryson
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FOR WARREN G. HARDING, the summer of 1927 was not a good one, which was perhaps a little surprising since he had been dead for nearly four years by then. -- Bill Bryson
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When Daniel Boone is uneasy, you know it's time to watch your step. -- Bill Bryson
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Tune your television to any channel it doesn't receive and about 1 percent of the dancing static you see is accounted for by this ancient remnant of the Big Bang. The next time you complain that there is nothing on, remember that you can always watch the birth of the universe. -- Bill Bryson
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In fact, mostly what the Forest Service does is build roads. -- Bill Bryson
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In short, the remarkable position in which we find ourselves is that we don't actually know what we actually know. In -- Bill Bryson
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Vitamin B proved to be not one vitamin but several, which is why we have B1, B2, and so on. To add to the confusion, Vitamin K has nothing to do with an alphabetical sequence. It was called K because its Danish discoverer, Henrik Dam, dubbed it "koagulations viatmin" for its role in blood clotting. -- Bill Bryson
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A critic named John Carter was so exercised by Wyatt's predilection for ripping out ancient interiors that he dubbed him "the Destroyer" and devoted 212 essays in the Gentleman's Magazine - essentially his whole career - to attacking Wyatt's style and character. At -- Bill Bryson
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Jefferson, incidentally, was also a great adventurer with foods. Among his many other accomplishments, he was the first person in America to slice potatoes lengthwise and fry them. So as well as being the author of the Declaration of Independence, he was also the father of the American French fry. -- Bill Bryson
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I would make a genuinely terrible guide. I can't remember things. I would get half way through telling a story or explaining something and I would get distracted. Oh, and I have absolutely no sense of direction at all. -- Bill Bryson
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It's an unnerving thought that we may be the living universe's supreme achievement and its worst nightmare simultaneously. -- Bill Bryson
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We may be the living universe's supreme achievement and its worst nightmare simultaneously. Because -- Bill Bryson
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[Americans] were, for one thing, so smitten with the idea of progress that they invented things without having any idea whether those things would be of any use. -- Bill Bryson
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The English invented cricket to make other human endeavors look interesting. -- Bill Bryson
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Even in walking across the room you will very slightly alter your own experience of time and space. -- Bill Bryson
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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
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The Forest Service is truly an extraordinary institution. A lot of people, seeing that word forest in the title, assume it has something to do with looking after trees. In fact, no - though that was the original plan. -- Bill Bryson
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The Italians even have a word for the mark left on a table by a moist glass (culacino) while the Gaelic speakers of Scotland, not to be outdone, have a word for the itchiness that overcomes the upper lip just before taking a sip of whiskey. (Wouldn't they just?) It's sgriob. -- Bill Bryson
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Velleity, which describes a mild desire, a wish or urge too slight to lead to action. -- Bill Bryson
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Not until 1902, at an early meeting of the International Congress of Zoology, did naturalists begin at last to show a spirit of compromise and adopt a universal code. Taxonomy -- Bill Bryson
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ONE OF THE THINGS that happens when you get older is that you discover lots of new ways to hurt yourself. Recently, in France, I was hit square on the head by an automatic parking barrier, something I don't think I could have managed in my younger, more alert years. -- Bill Bryson
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Taxonomy is described sometimes as a science and sometimes as an art, but really it's a battleground. -- Bill Bryson
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The great Caltech physicist Richard Feynman once observed that if you had to reduce scientific history to one important statement it would be: "All things are made of atoms. -- Bill Bryson
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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. -- Bill Bryson
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Looking for a supernova, therefore, was a little like standing on the observation platform of the Empire State Building with a telescope and searching windows around Manhattan in the hope of finding, let us say, someone lighting a twenty-first birthday cake. -- Bill Bryson
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So we are stuck with a theory, and we do not know whether it is right or wrong, but we do know that it is a little wrong, or at least incomplete. In -- Bill Bryson
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I've been wanting to do a book about baseball for the longest time, and nobody will let me do it. It's the one thing from America I really miss. -- Bill Bryson
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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. -- Bill Bryson
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Taking a scenic route in Southeast Iowa is like talking about a good Barry Manilow album. You have to make certain allowances. -- Bill Bryson
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In Anglo-Saxon times, according to Crippen, it was customary for someone offering a drink to say, "Wassail!" and for the recipient to respond "Drinkhail!" and for the participants to repeat the exercise until comfortably horizontal. -- Bill Bryson
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Like all limestones, the famous White Cliffs of Dover, on England's south coast, are made from numberless trillions of tiny marine organisms compressed over time into stone, and exist now as huge reservoirs of carbon. (credit 17.13) -- Bill Bryson
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I stood in a Burger King and studied, with absorption, the photographs of the manager and his executive crew (reflecting on the curious fact that people who go into hamburger management always look as if their mother slept with Goofy), -- Bill Bryson
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What we do have for Shakespeare are his plays - all of them but one or two - thanks in very large part to the efforts of his colleagues Henry Condell and John Heminges, who put together a more or less complete volume of his work after his death - the justly revered First Folio. -- Bill Bryson
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The hardest part was coming to terms with the constant dispiriting discovery that there is always more hill. -- Bill Bryson
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Fears have been raised that in their enthusiasm scientists might inadvertently create a black hole or even something called "strange quarks," which could, theoretically, interact with other subatomic particles and propagate uncontrollably. If you are reading this, that hasn't happened. Finding -- Bill Bryson
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Most people think they want Main Streets but won't make the small sacrifices in terms of time, cost, and footpower necessary to sustain them. The sad fact is that we have created a culture in which most people will happily-indeed, unthinkingly-drive an extra couple of miles to walk thirty less feet. -- Bill Bryson
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Mrs. Lindbergh declined all pleas to kiss or embrace her son, explaining that they came from "an undemonstrative Nordic race," which in her case was wholly untrue. -- Bill Bryson
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London isn't a place at all. It's a million little places. -- Bill Bryson
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Personally, I've never been attracted to danger. It's not my sort of thing. I am more attracted to pubs and cafes. The known, safe and comfortable world. -- Bill Bryson
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In 1906 he and Hulda made the first of several trips to London to sift through the records. -- Bill Bryson
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It's the place you would go if you wanted to buy a stereo system for under thirty-five dollars and didn't care if it sounded like the band was playing in a mailbox under water in a distant lake. -- Bill Bryson
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A cough so robust that I tapped into two new seams of phlegm. -- Bill Bryson
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Shenandoah National Park is lovely. It is possibly the most wonderful national park I have ever been in, and, considering the impossible and conflicting demands put on it, it is extremely well run. Almost at once it became my favorite part of the Appalachian Trail. -- Bill Bryson
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Without local newspapers there's no one to tell you when somebody's been fined for having rats in their kitchens. -- Bill Bryson
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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
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Eating in Sweden is really just a series of heartbreaks. -- Bill Bryson
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Sabine Baring-Gould wrote the hymn "Onward, Christian Soldiers" and, more unexpectedly, the first novel to feature a werewolf. -- Bill Bryson
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And now the state was about to bring the law back, proving conclusively that the danger for Tennesseans isn't so much that they may be descended from apes as overtaken by them. -- Bill Bryson
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To get from "protoplasmal primordial atomic globule" (as Gilbert and Sullivan put it) to sentient upright modern human has required you to mutate new traits over and over in a precisely timely manner for an exceedingly long while. -- Bill Bryson
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Pennsylvania one year paid out $90,000 in bounties for the killing of 130,000 owls and hawks to save the state's farmers a slightly less than whopping $1,875 in estimated livestock losses. (It is not very often, after all, that an owl carries off a cow.) -- Bill Bryson
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There is no question that a Neanderthal could easily beat us up. So, too, presumably could their women, which may be why we are only 2 percent Neanderthal instead of 50 percent. Those bitches were too scary for us. -- Bill Bryson
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I have made a career of bumbling around places, stumbling on landmarks and generally being quite haphazard and shambolic about the way I go about things. -- Bill Bryson
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If you drive to, say, Shenandoah National Park, or the Great Smoky Mountains, you'll get some appreciation for the scale and beauty of the outdoors. When you walk into it, then you see it in a completely different way. You discover it in a much slower, more majestic sort of way. -- Bill Bryson
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If the Chandos portrait is not genuine, then we are left with two other possible likenesses to help us decide what William Shakespeare looked like. The first is the copperplate engraving that appeared as the frontispiece of the collected works of Shakespeare in 1623 - the famous First Folio. -- Bill Bryson
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The ill-fated dodo. Slow, flightless and dangerously trusting, the dodo was driven to extinction just seventy years after first being spotted by European sailors on its island home of Mauritius. -- Bill Bryson
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I wanted a little of that swagger that comes with being able to gaze at a far horizon through eyes of chipped granite and say with a slow, manly sniff, Yeah, I've shit in the woods. -- Bill Bryson
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A Midsummer Night's Dream remains an enchanting work after four hundred years, but few would argue that it cuts to the very heart of human behaviour. What it does do is take, and give, a positive satisfaction in the joyous possibilities of verbal expression. -- Bill Bryson
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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
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The National Park Service actually has something of a tradition of making things extinct. -- Bill Bryson
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That's the trouble with losing your mind; by the time it's gone, it's too late to get it back. -- Bill Bryson
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It seems impossible that you could get something from nothing, but the fact that once there was nothing and now there is a universe is evident proof that you can. -- Bill Bryson
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Report in The Economist as much as 97 per cent of the world's plant and animal species may still await discovery. Of -- Bill Bryson
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The greater koa finch, an innocuous member of the honeycreeper family, lurked shyly in the canopies of koa trees, but if someone imitated its song it would abandon its cover at once and fly down in a show of welcome. -- Bill Bryson
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Look, if you draw a two thousand-mile-long line across the United States at any angle, it's going to pass through nine murder victims. -- Bill Bryson
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Although I was always very happy in Britain, I never stopped thinking of America as home, in the fundamental sense of the term. It was where I came from, what I really understood, the base against which all else was measured. -- Bill Bryson
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In terms of adaptability, humans are pretty amazingly useless. -- Bill Bryson
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Geologists are never at a loss for paperweights. -- Bill Bryson
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For almost four billion years life had dawdled along without any detectable ambitions in the direction of complexity, and then suddenly, in the space of just five or ten million years, it had created all the basic body designs still in use today. -- Bill Bryson
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Mendeleyev was said to have modelled the table on the card game solitaire. -- Bill Bryson
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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
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radiocarbon dating works only for objects up to forty thousand or so years old. Curiously, -- Bill Bryson
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I became quietly seized with that nostalgia that overcomes you when you have reached the middle of your life and your father has recently died and it dawns on you that when he went he took some of you with him. -- Bill Bryson
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DNA is, as it were, especially unalive. It is among the most nonreactive, chemically inert molecules in the living world, -- Bill Bryson
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The rooms were small and airless and cramped. To make matters worse, somebody in our group was making the most dreadful silent farts. Fortunately, it was me, so I wasn't nearly as bothered as the others. -- Bill Bryson
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As my father always used to tell me, 'You see, son, there's always someone in the world worse off than you.' And I always used to think, 'So? -- Bill Bryson
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In office buildings and retail premises in which entry is through double doors and one of those doors is locked for no reason, the door must bear a large sign saying: This Door Is Locked for No Reason. -- Bill Bryson
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The animals we raise for food today are eaten not because they are notably delectable or nutritious or a pleasure to be around, but because they were the ones first domesticated in the Stone Age. -- Bill Bryson
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Bayes's theorem and that looks like this: People who understand Bayes's theorem can use it to work out complex problems involving probability distributions - or inverse probabilities, as they are sometimes called. -- Bill Bryson
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Thank you," I said and then abruptly leaned across the counter and with two forked fingers poked him sharply in the eyes. Actually, I didn't do that. I just imagined it. But imagining it made me feel better. I -- Bill Bryson
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3.18-million-year-old australopithecine found at Hadar in Ethiopia in 1974 by a team led by Donald Johanson. Formally known as A.L. -- Bill Bryson
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James Croll, the Scottish janitor and self-taught polymath whose theories concerning Earth's orbit provided the first plausible explanation for how ice ages might have started. -- Bill Bryson
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Bill Tilden was the greatest - and most improbably great - tennis player of the age. -- Bill Bryson
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The tiniest deviation from any of these evolutionary imperatives and you might now be licking algae from cave walls or lolling walrus-like on some stony shore or disgorging air through a blowhole in the top of your head before diving sixty feet for a mouthful of delicious sandworms. Not -- Bill Bryson
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Shakespeare used 17,677 words in his writings, of which at least one-tenth had never been used before. Imagine if every tenth word you wrote were original. It is a staggering display of ingenuity. But -- Bill Bryson
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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 ... We're reaching the point where a lot of the English countryside looks just like Iowa - just kind of open space. -- Bill Bryson
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Only Brunel had experience with large-scale projects. He was indubitably a genius but an unnerving one, as it nearly always took epic infusions of time and cash to find a point of intersection between his soaring visions and an achievable reality. -- Bill Bryson
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Being a pessimist is just such a gloomy way of looking at things, so I have to hope for the best - life wouldn't be worth living if we didn't have hope. And I also do think that human beings often do do wonderful, correct, brilliant things. So, on balance, I'd like to be optimistic about the future. -- Bill Bryson
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But what is life to a lichen ? Yet its impulse to exist, to be, is every bit as strong as ours arguably even stronger. If I were told that I had to spend decades being a furry growth on a rock in the woods, I believe I would lose the will to go on. -- Bill Bryson
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Although the creation of a universe might be very unlikely, Tryon emphasized that no one had counted the failed attempts." Martin -- Bill Bryson
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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
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If a product or enterprise doesn't constantly reinvent itself, it is superseded, cast aside, abandoned without sentiment in favor of something bigger, newer, and, alas, nearly always uglier. -- Bill Bryson
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A full moon rose in the pale evening sky and glowed with a rich white inner light that brought to mind, but perfectly, the creamy inside of an Oreo cookie. (Eventually on the trail everything reminds you of food.) -- Bill Bryson
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To me that was just a miracle. That has been my position with science ever since. Excited, -- Bill Bryson
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I come from Des Moines. Somebody had to. -- Bill Bryson
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Every dog on the face of the earth wants me dead. -- Bill Bryson
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For the moment we might very well can them DUNNOS (for Dark Unknown Nonreflective Nondetectable Objects Somewhere). -- Bill Bryson
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Sometimes it rained, but mostly it was just dull, a land without shadows. It was like living inside Tupperware. -- Bill Bryson
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At all events, rather less is known about Lucy than is generally supposed. It isn't even actually known that she was a female. -- Bill Bryson
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Now this little gal isn't much of a singer," she would say. "She learned singing by a correspondence course, and she missed a coupla lessons, but she's the nicest little gal in the whole show, so I want ya to give her a big hand. -- Bill Bryson
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I ordered a coffee and a little something to eat and savored the warmth and dryness. Somewhere in the background Nat King Cole sang a perky tune. I watched the rain beat down on the road outside and told myself that one day this would be twenty years ago. -- Bill Bryson
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Part of the power of travel is that you stand a good chance of being hollowed out by it. -- Bill Bryson
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He left to do whatever editors do. -- Bill Bryson
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In fact, overwhelmingly museum displays are artificial. -- Bill Bryson
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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
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When we peer into the distance some of the galaxies we see may simply be reflections, ghost images created by rebounded light. -- Bill Bryson
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At all events, thanks to the work of Clair Patterson, by 1953 the Earth at last had an age everyone could agree on. -- Bill Bryson
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Alexander von Humboldt, yet another friend, may have had Agassiz at least partly in mind when he observed that there are three stages in scientific discovery: first, people deny that it is true; then they deny that it is important; finally they credit the wrong person. At -- Bill Bryson
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the mightiest and most extensive mountain range on Earth was - mostly - under water. -- Bill Bryson
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Coming back to your native land after an absence of many years is a surprisingly unsettling business, a little like waking from a long coma. Time, you discover, has wrought changes that leave you feeling mildly foolish and out of touch. -- Bill Bryson
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Goodness knows what the world is coming to when park rangers carry service revolvers. -- Bill Bryson
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transits of Venus, as they are known, are an irregular occurrence. They come in pairs eight years apart, but then are absent for a century or more, -- Bill Bryson
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So what is your star sign?' Said Mary Ellen 'Cunnilingus' Katz answered looking profoundly unhappy. -- Bill Bryson
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Christmas tree stands are the work of the devil and they want you dead. -- Bill Bryson
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hadrons" - a collective term used by physicists for protons, neutrons and other particles governed by the strong nuclear force. -- Bill Bryson
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Worse still, it isn't actually necessary to look to space for petrifying danger. As we are about to see, Earth can provide plenty of danger of its own. -- Bill Bryson
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The first book I did - the first successful book - was a kind of a travel book, and publishers in Britain encouraged me to do more. -- Bill Bryson
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John was prosecuted (or threatened with prosecution - the records are sometimes a touch unclear) for trading in wool and for money-lending, both highly illegal activities. -- Bill Bryson
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(When the company was finally broken up in the 1980s to satisfy antitrust regulators, it was worth more than the combined worth of General Electric, General Motors, Ford, IBM, Xerox, and Coca-Cola, and employed a million people.) Bell moved to Washington, D.C., became -- Bill Bryson
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I wish I could adjust my voice, but it's just what's happened to me. It's because I've lived abroad for a long time, and my wife is English and my kids all have English accents, and every voice I hear is English. I've never intentionally changed my accent at all. -- Bill Bryson
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There was so much unrecognized novelty in the collection that at one point18 upon opening a new drawer Conway Morris famously was heard to mutter, 'Oh fuck, not another phylum.' The -- Bill Bryson
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Queen Elizabeth, in a much-cited quote, faithfully bathed once a month "whether she needs it or no. -- Bill Bryson
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John A. Templer of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, author of the definitive (and, it must be said, almost only) scholarly text on the subject, The Staircase: Studies of Hazards, Falls, and Safer Design, suggests that all fall-injury figures are probably severely underestimated anyway. -- Bill Bryson
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You can be a scientist and believe in god: the two can go hand in hand. -- Bill Bryson
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Looked at from above, west London isn't so much a city as a forest with buildings. -- Bill Bryson
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As a rule of thumb, I would submit that if you need to call your floss provider, for any reason, you are probably not ready for this level of oral hygiene. -- Bill Bryson
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When you tell an Iowan a joke, you can see a kind of race going on between his brain and his expression. -- Bill Bryson
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The human diet consists of just nine plants: corn, rice, wheat, potatoes, cassava, sorghum, millet, beans, barley, rye and oats. -- Bill Bryson
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Polysemy, and it is very common. Sound is another polysemic word. -- Bill Bryson
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I still enjoy traveling a lot. I mean, it amazes me that I still get excited in hotel rooms just to see what kind of shampoo they've left me. -- Bill Bryson
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Italians are entirely without any commitment to order. They live their lives in a kind of pandemonium, which I find very attractive. -- Bill Bryson
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Out of the thirty thousand types of edible plants thought to exist on Earth, just eleven - corn, rice, wheat, potatoes, cassava, sorghum, millet, beans, barley, rye, and oats - account for 93 percent of all that humans eat, and every one of them was first cultivated by our Neolithic ancestors. -- Bill Bryson
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What on earth would I do if four bears came into my camp? Why, I would die of course. Literally shit myself lifeless. -- Bill Bryson
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Pair of Stephens Island wrens, which were found only on a small, isolated island in New Zealand's Cook Strait. All were killed by a lighthouse keeper's cat. -- Bill Bryson
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It is an extraordinary fact but a true one that there are thousands of men in Britain who will never need Viagra as long as steam trains are in operation. -- Bill Bryson
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Was just very compact, not much larger than a standard wardrobe. But it was a marvel of ergonomics. It included -- Bill Bryson
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Jesus, I smell like Jeffrey Dahmer's refrigerator. -- Bill Bryson
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Whatever the losses in warmth and comfort, the gains in space proved irresistible. So the development of the fireplace became one of the great breakthroughs in domestic history: they allowed people to lay boards across the beams and create a whole new world upstairs. -- Bill Bryson
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Annie Jump Cannon (left) and Henrietta Leavitt, whose unsung labours and incisive deductions made Hubble's breakthroughs possible. -- Bill Bryson
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Traveling is more fun
hell, life is more fun
if you can treat it as a series of impulses. -- Bill Bryson
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It wasn't until we dropped him at his university dormitory and left him there looking touchingly lost and bewildered amid an assortment of cardboard boxes and suitcases in a spartan room not unlike a prison cell that it really hit home that he was vanishing out of our lives and into his own. -- Bill Bryson
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When authorities learned that Eugene O'Neill's play All God's Chillun proposed to show black and white children playing together as if that were normal, the district attorney for Manhattan sent the police to stop it. -- Bill Bryson
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If you can imagine a man having a vasectomy without anesthetic to the sound of frantic sitar-playing, you will have some idea of what popular Turkish music is like. -- Bill Bryson
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more students of English in China than there are people in the United States. -- Bill Bryson
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I have a small tattered clipping that I sometimes carry with meand pull out for purposes of privateamusement. It's a weather forecast from theWestern Daily Mail and it says, in toto: 'Outlook: Dry and warm, but cooler with some rain. -- Bill Bryson
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18th century scientists, the French in particular, seldom did things simply if an absurdly demanding alternative was available. -- Bill Bryson
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It was a lot more fun to get famous than to be famous. -- Bill Bryson
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Far from marking the outer edge of the solar system, as those schoolroom maps so cavalierly imply, Pluto is barely one-fifty-thousandth of the way. -- Bill Bryson
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Of all the things I am not very good at, living in the real world is perhaps the most outstanding. -- Bill Bryson
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In the mystifying world that was Victorian parenthood, obedience took precedence over all considerations of affection and happiness, and that odd, painful conviction remained the case in most well-heeled homes up until at least the time of the First World War. -- Bill Bryson
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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
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The pleasant fact is that the British are not much good at violent crime except in fiction, which is of course as it should be. -- Bill Bryson
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Lucy constituted only 28 per cent of a half skeleton (and only about 20 per cent of a full one). -- Bill Bryson
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Yugoslavian hotel: "The flattening of underwear with pleasure is the job of the chambermaid. Turn to her straightaway. -- Bill Bryson
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Lots of people leave Pennsylvania limping and bruised. The state also has what are reputed to be the meanest rattlesnakes anywhere along the trail, -- Bill Bryson
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He was taken to St. Lawrence Hospital and died the next day. He never regained consciousness. -- Bill Bryson
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When I awoke it was daylight. The inside of my tent was coated in a curious flaky rime, which I realized after a moment was all of my nighttime snores, condensed and frozen and pasted to the fabric, as if into a scrapbook of respiratory memories. -- Bill Bryson
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Instead, we were given the period of unusual tranquillity known as the Holocene, the time in which we live now. -- Bill Bryson
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In order to have quality journalism you need to have a good income stream, and no Internet model has produced a way of generating income that would pay for good-quality investigative journalism. -- Bill Bryson
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But don't worry," she continued. "Most snakes don't want to hurt you. If you're out in the bush and a snake comes along, just stop dead and let it slide over your shoes."
This, I decided, was the least-likely-to-be-followed advice I have ever been given. -- Bill Bryson
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There Kelvin proved himself such a prodigy that he was admitted to Glasgow University at the exceedingly tender age of ten. -- Bill Bryson
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From a selection of his other works, we might think him variously courtly, cerebral, metaphysical, melancholic, Machiavellian, neurotic, lighthearted, loving, and much more. Shakespeare was of course all these things - as a writer. We hardly know what he was as a person. -- Bill Bryson
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There isn't a landscape in the world that is more artfully worked, more lovely to behold, more comfortable to be in, than the countryside of Great Britain. It is the world's largest park, its most perfect accidental garden. -- Bill Bryson
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At a minimum the name should puzzle foreigners - this is a basic requirement of most British institutions - and ideally it should excite long and inconclusive debate, defy all logical explanation, and evoke images that border on the surreal. Among -- Bill Bryson
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Bundesbahnangestelltenwitwe (a widow of a federal railway employee), -- Bill Bryson
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Most big companies don't like you very much, except hotels, airlines and Microsoft, which don't like you at all. -- Bill Bryson
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Boston's freeway system is insane. It was clearly designed by a person who had spent his childhood crashing toy trains. -- Bill Bryson
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Columbus real achievement was managing to cross the ocean successfully in both directions. Though an accomplished enough mariner, he was not terribly good at a great deal else, especially geography, the skill that would seem most vital in an explorer. -- Bill Bryson
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I painted myself into a corner by writing a whole book on this one period. The summer of 1927 came to an end, but nothing else did - all of these peoples' lives went on. -- Bill Bryson
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Daniel Boone, who not only wrestled bears but tried to date their sisters, described corners of the southern Appalachians as so wild and horrid that it is impossible to behold them without terror. -- Bill Bryson
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Cheapness is a great virtue. -- Bill Bryson
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Never has the promise of glowing skin been more dangerously apt than in the early years of the twentieth century when radium was commonly used as a featured ingredient in beauty products. (credit 7.11) Thanks -- Bill Bryson
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The way I see it, there are three reasons never to be unhappy. First, you were born. This in itself is a remarkable achievement. -- Bill Bryson
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at Birkenhead, near Liverpool, designed and built the world's first municipal park. This park so captivated the American landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted that he modeled Central Park in New York on it. -- Bill Bryson
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The famous jack-o-lantern mushroom, which glows at night with a greenish phosphorescent ligh called foxfire. -- Bill Bryson
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If a potato can produce vitamin C, why can't we? Within the animal kingdom only humans and guinea pigs are unable to synthesize vitamin C in their own bodies. Why us and guinea pigs? No point asking. Nobody knows. -- Bill Bryson
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Nobody knows quite how destructive human beings are, but it is a fact that over the last fifty thousand years or so, wherever we have gone animals have tended to vanish, often in astonishingly large numbers. In -- Bill Bryson
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Second, you are alive. For the tiniest moment in the span of eternity you have the miraculous privilege to exist. -- Bill Bryson
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Greenland ice cores show the temperatures there changing by as much as 8 degrees Celsius in ten years, drastically altering rainfall patterns and growing conditions. -- Bill Bryson
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It is a challenge to believe that there was ever a time that airline food was exciting, when stewardesses were happy to see you, when flying was such an occasion that you wore your finest clothes. I -- Bill Bryson
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At the North Carolina border, the dull landscape ended abruptly, as if by decree. Suddenly the countryside rose and fell in majestic undulations, full of creeping thickets of laurel, rhododendron and palmetto. -- Bill Bryson
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Still, I never really mind bad service in a restaurant. It makes me feel better about not leaving a tip. -- Bill Bryson
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On a cooler sun on a primordial earth:
I later learned that biologists, when they are feeling jocose, refer to this as the 'Chinese Resaturant Problem'
because we has a dim sun. -- Bill Bryson
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He had the sort of face that makes you realize God does have a sense of humor. -- Bill Bryson
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We have better maps of Mars than we do of our own seabeds. At -- Bill Bryson
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All 2,100 miles of the trail, as well as side trails, footbridges, signs, blazes, and shelters, are maintained by volunteers - indeed, the AT is said to be the largest volunteer-run undertaking on the planet. -- Bill Bryson
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Much as I hate to stand out in a crowd, I have this terrible occasional compulsion to make myself a source of merriment for the world, and I had come close to sealing new heights with a Russian hat. Now, clearly, that would be unnecessary. -- Bill Bryson
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( ... )we all recognize a likeness of Shakespeare the instant we see one, and yet we don't really know what he looked like. It is like this with nearly every aspect of his life and character: He is at once the best known and least known of figures. -- Bill Bryson
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I hung up again and looked at Katz. What is it with this town? I've blown more intelligent life into a handkerchief. -- Bill Bryson
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What this means in practice is that if you are not a born worrier you have nothing to worry about (though of course you wouldn't be worrying anyway), whereas if you are a worrier by nature there is absolutely nothing you can do about it, so you may as well stop worrying, except of course you can't. -- Bill Bryson
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To be fair, English is full of booby traps for the unwary foreigner. Any language where the unassuming word fly signifies an annoying insect, a means of travel, and a critical part of a gentleman's apparel is clearly asking to be mangled. -- Bill Bryson
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Canvas tarpaulin, and a piece of old carpet. I'm not sure that they didn't lay an old wardrobe on top of that, just to -- Bill Bryson
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The Reverend Sydney Smith, though a man of the cloth, caught the spirit of the age by declining to say grace. 'With the ravenous orgasm upon you, it seems impertinent to interpose a religious sentiment,' he explained. 'It is a confusion of purpose to mutter out praises from a mouth that waters. -- Bill Bryson
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To be here now, alive in the twenty-first century and smart enough to know it, you also had to be the beneficiary of an extraordinary string of biological good fortune. -- Bill Bryson
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Just because a word or expression has an antiquity or was once widely used does not confer on it some special immunity -- Bill Bryson
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I once joked in a book that there are three things you can't do in life. You can't beat the phone company, you can't make a waiter see you until he is ready to see you, and you can't go home again. Since the spring of 1995, I have been quietly, even gamely, reassessing point number three. -- Bill Bryson
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If you want to say that a word has a circumflex on its penultimate syllable, without saying flat out that it has a circumflex there, there is a word for it: properispomenon. -- Bill Bryson
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properispomenon. -- Bill Bryson
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A diarist named George Templeton Strong recorded in the winter of 1866 that even with two furnaces alight and all the fireplaces blazing, he couldn't get the temperature of his Boston home above 38 degrees Fahrenheit. -- Bill Bryson
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Illiteracy was the usual condition in sixteenth-century England, to be sure. According to one estimate at least 70 percent of men and 90 percent of women of the period couldn't even sign their names. But as one moved up the social scale, literacy rates rose appreciably. -- Bill Bryson
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We can't see even into the Oort cloud, so we don't actually know that it is there. Its existence is probable but entirely hypothetical.1 About -- Bill Bryson
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Mars-sized object slammed into Earth, blowing out enough material to create the Moon from the debris. -- Bill Bryson
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As the saying goes, it takes all kinds to make the world go around, though perhaps some shouldn't go quite so far around it as others. -- Bill Bryson
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Peale was a lover of birds, and yet did not hesitate to kill them in large numbers for no better reason than that it interested him to do so. -- Bill Bryson
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Twice I flushed grouse, always a terrifying experience: an instantaneous explosion from the undergrowth at your feet, like balled socks fired from a gun, followed by drifting feathers and a lingering residue of fussy, bitching noise. I -- Bill Bryson
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Thankfully for us, water seems unaware of the rules of chemistry or laws of physics. Everyone -- Bill Bryson
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I just use my life story as a kind of device on which to hang comic observations. It's not my interest or instinct to tell the world anything pertinent about myself or my family. -- Bill Bryson
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He sees our lineal success as a fortunate fluke: "Wind back the tape of life to the early days of the Burgess Shale; let it play again from an identical starting point, and the chance becomes vanishingly small that anything like human intelligence would grace the replay." Gould -- Bill Bryson
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In 1580, when William was sixteen, Campion passed through Warwickshire on his way to the more safely Catholic north. He stayed with a distant relative of Shakespeare's, Sir William Catesby, whose son Robert would later be a ringleader of the Gunpowder Plot. -- Bill Bryson
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The woman who engaged him had no idea that her gardener was one of the most distinguished scientists in Britain until a friend came for tea one day and, looking out the window, casually asked: "My dear, why is the Nobel laureate Sir Lawrence Bragg pruning your hedges?" Late -- Bill Bryson
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All over the inchoate solar system, the same was happening. Colliding dust grains formed larger and larger clumps. Eventually the clumps grew large enough to be called planetesimals. -- Bill Bryson
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A significant fraction of thru-hikers reach Katahdin, then turn around and start back to Georgia. They just can't stop walking, which kind of makes you wonder. -- Bill Bryson
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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
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You may find that your parents are the most delightful people, but you don't want to live with them. -- Bill Bryson
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I can't fix the world. If you want to make a difference in life, you have to direct your energies in a focused way. -- Bill Bryson
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On this scale, according to John McPhee in Basin and Range, the distance from the fingertips of one hand to the wrist of the other is Precambrian. All of complex life is in one hand, and in a single stroke with a medium-grained nail file you could eradicate human history. -- Bill Bryson
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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
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They talk about big skies in the western United States, and they may indeed have them, but you have never seen such lofty clouds, such towering anvils, as in Iowa in July. -- Bill Bryson
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Or look at the old money, with its florins and half crowns and thrupenny bits, and imagine what it was like in the days when people had to add tuppence ha'penny to one shilling four nibblings or whatever. With -- Bill Bryson
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They were most peculiar. And they eat pizza pie." "For breakfast?" "No, for lunch and dinner. But it's not a pie at all, it's a kind of bread with tomato sauce and cheese on it." "Sounds dreadful. -- Bill Bryson
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I took a train to Liverpool. they were having a festival when I arrived. Citizens had taken time off from their busy activities to add crisp packets, empty cigarette boxes and carrier-bags to the other wise bland and neglected landscape. -- Bill Bryson
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The dandelion was long popularly known as the 'pissabed' because of its supposed diuretic properties, and other names in everyday use included 'mare's fart', 'naked ladies', 'twitch-ballock', 'hounds-piss', 'open arse', and 'bum-towel'. -- Bill Bryson
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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
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Incidentally, the long-held idea that spices were used to mask rotting food doesn't stand up to much scrutiny. The only people who could afford most spices were the ones least likely to have bad meat, and anyway spices were too valuable to be used as a mask. -- Bill Bryson
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Data from any single gene cannot really tell you anything so definitive. If -- Bill Bryson
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The romance of travel wasn't always terribly evident to those who were actually experiencing it. -- Bill Bryson
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We wanted proper outback: a place where men were men and sheep were nervous. -- Bill Bryson
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I do find London exciting. Much as I hate to agree with that tedious old git Samuel Johnson, and despite the pompous imbecility of his famous remark about when a man is tired of London he is tired of life ... I can't dispute it. -- Bill Bryson
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I ended up with enough equipment to bring full employment to a vale of sherpas - -- Bill Bryson
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We live on a planet that more or less has an infinite capacity to surprise. -- Bill Bryson
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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. -- Bill Bryson
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There is no point in hurrying because you are not actually going anywhere. However far or long you plod, you are always in the same place: in the woods. -- Bill Bryson
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Food was similarly regulated, with restrictions placed on how many courses one might eat, depending on status. -- Bill Bryson
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In the United States, frozen cheese pizza is regulated by the Food and Drug Administration. Frozen pepperoni pizza, on the other hand, is regulated by the Department of Agriculture. -- Bill Bryson
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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
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To my mind, the greatest reward and luxury of travel is to be able to experience everyday things as if for the first time, to be in a position in which almost nothing is so familiar it is taken for granted. -- Bill Bryson
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Shakespeare, it appears, was caught up in the affair because he had been a lodger in Mountjoy's house in Cripplegate in 1604 when the dispute arose. -- Bill Bryson
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The complexities of the English language are such that even native speakers cannot always communicate effectively, as almost every American learns on his first day in Britain. -- Bill Bryson
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English, as Charlton Laird has noted, is the only language that has, or needs, books of synonyms like Roget's Thesaurus. "Most speakers of other languages are not aware that such books exist" [The Miracle of Language, page 54]. -- Bill Bryson
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There is a phenomenon called Trail Magic, known and spoken of with reverence by everyone who hikes the trail, which holds that often when things look darkest some little piece of serendipity comes along to put you back on a heavenly plane. -- Bill Bryson
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It occurred to me with a certain uncomfortable forcefulness that I didn't know the first thing about the only planet I was ever going to live on. -- Bill Bryson
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A plumped feather bed may have looked divine, but occupants quickly found themselves sinking into a hard, airless fissure between billowy hills. Support was on a lattice of ropes, which could be tightened with a key when they began to sag (hence the expression "sleep tight"). -- Bill Bryson
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Maine is wonderful. It can be very hard. I mean, if you look at the profile maps it doesn't look it, but somehow when you get out there it's really steep and hard. -- Bill Bryson
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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. -- Bill Bryson
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The current best estimate for the Earth's weight is 5.9725 billion trillion tonnes, -- Bill Bryson
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She was the mother of eight children: four daughters, of whom only one lived to adulthood, and four sons, all of whom reached their majority but only one of whom, Will, married. -- Bill Bryson
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Can take up to ten million years to clean an ocean - but if you are not in a hurry it is marvellously efficient. Perhaps -- Bill Bryson
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It occurred to me, not for the first time, that if Britain is ever to sort itself out, it is going to require a lot of euthanasia. -- Bill Bryson
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As John Reader understatedly observes in the book Missing Links, "It is remarkable how often the first interpretations of new evidence have confirmed the preconceptions of its discoverer." All -- Bill Bryson
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The world is very lucky to have America. It's got to be the first time in the whole history of the planet that a country has been the dominant force in the world and it has actually been a force for good ... America really deserves more credit. -- Bill Bryson
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Nearly a quarter of American men were in the Armed forces [in 1968] . The rest were in school, in prison, or were George W. Bush. -- Bill Bryson
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The author reveals a cultural change that took place when clergy were paid based on a tax on the land's value rather than what it produced. This meant that, while parishioners could suffer through a terrible year, clergy would always have a comfortable one. -- Bill Bryson
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What sets the carbon atom apart is that it is shamelessly promiscuous. -- Bill Bryson
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He had a curiously stunted sense of humor and loved practical jokes that veered dangerously close to cruelty. Once on a hot day he filled a friend's water jug with kerosene and mirthfully stood by as the friend took a mighty swig. The friend ended up in the hospital. -- Bill Bryson
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The most elusive element of all, however, appears to be francium28, which is so rare that it is thought that our entire planet may contain, at any given moment, fewer than twenty francium atoms. -- Bill Bryson
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My mother only ever said two things. She said,'I don't know, dear.'And she said,'Can I get you a sandwich, honey? -- Bill Bryson
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Anyone who has read my books will know that I don't tend to use guides when I am travelling. It's not a pride thing, but it is certainly a fact. -- Bill Bryson
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I didn't ask for twenty quarter-pound cheeseburgers, I asked for four quarter-pound cheeseburgers five times." "Same thing," he said. "It's not the same thing at all. You can't be this stupid." Two -- Bill Bryson
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For you to be here now, trillions of drifting atoms had somehow to assemble in an intricate and curiously obliging manner to create you. -- Bill Bryson
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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. -- Bill Bryson
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I also learned that about ten thousand containers fall off ships each year. Sometimes after a period of years the container doors pop open and the contents float to the surface. -- Bill Bryson
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The average Southerner has the speech patterns of someone slipping in and out of consciousness. I can change my shoes and socks faster than most people in Mississippi can speak a sentence. -- Bill Bryson
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Every human body consists of about 10 quadrillion cells, but about 100 quadrillion bacterial cells. They are, in short, a big part of us. From the bacteria's point of view, of course, we are a rather small part of them. -- Bill Bryson
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one cannot "predict future events exactly if one cannot even measure the present state of the universe precisely! -- Bill Bryson
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Among the other enthusiastic dumpers were Russia, China, Japan and nearly all the nations of Europe. -- Bill Bryson
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I like to do books in which a lot of the research and the writing and the thinking revolves around something American. -- Bill Bryson
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The author says the earliest Australian aborigines devoted extraordinary amounts of energy to enterprises no one now can understand. -- Bill Bryson
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The favourite activity is drinking a lot of beer and the second is throwing it up again) -- Bill Bryson
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If one's husband had been married before and widowed - a fairly common condition - and a close relative of his first wife's died, the second wife was expected to engage in "complementary mourning" - a kind of proxy mourning on behalf of the deceased earlier partner. -- Bill Bryson
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Archbishop James Ussher of the Church of Ireland made a careful study of the Bible and other historical sources and concluded, in a hefty tome called Annals of the Old Testament, that the Earth had been created at midday on 23 October 4004 BC, an assertion -- Bill Bryson
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Among the tiny atomic structures the plankton take to the grave with them are two very stable isotopes - oxygen-16 and oxygen-18. -- Bill Bryson
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Even today our knowledge of the ocean floors remains remarkably low resolution. -- Bill Bryson
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Mrs. Mendeleyev hitchhiked with young Dmitri four thousand miles to St. Petersburg - that's equivalent to travelling from London to Equatorial Guinea - and deposited him at the Institute of Pedagogy. -- Bill Bryson
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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. -- Bill Bryson
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Yes, U.S. travelers dress better. The British are always so conspicuous in hot climates. They don't seem to wear shorts. American men seem to be comfortable wearing hot-weather clothing. -- Bill Bryson
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Buffon found himself threatened with excommunication for expressing it. A practical man, he apologized at once for his thoughtless heresy, then cheerfully repeated the assertions throughout his subsequent writings. -- Bill Bryson
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Experimentation without mathematical explanation is blind; mathematical explanation without experimentation is empty. -- Bill Bryson
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There are particles of matter and antimatter popping into existence and popping out again - and that these are pushing the universe outwards at an accelerating rate. -- Bill Bryson
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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
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I don't plan to write another science book, but I don't plan not to. I do enjoy writing histories, and taking subjects that are generally dull and trying to make them interesting. -- Bill Bryson
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A computer is a stupid machine with the ability to do incredibly smart things, while computer programmers are smart people with the ability to do incredibly stupid things. -- Bill Bryson
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The patients on Tuke Ward were a pleasant and tractable bunch and practised insanity with a certain elan. -- Bill Bryson
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I refer of course to the soaring wonder of the age known as the Eiffel Tower. Never in history has a structure been more technologically advanced, materially obsolescent, and gloriously pointless all at the same time. -- Bill Bryson
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It occurred to me that Australians are so surrounded with danger that they have evolved an entirely new vocabulary to deal with it. -- Bill Bryson
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Imagine having a city full of things that no other city had. -- Bill Bryson
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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. -- Bill Bryson
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However senior or accomplished, they were not allowed into the college's senior common room but instead had to take their meals in a more utilitarian chamber -- Bill Bryson
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In countless small ways the world around us grows gradually shittier. Well, I don't like it at all. -- Bill Bryson
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When you consider it from a human perspective, and clearly it would be difficult for us to do otherwise, life is an odd thing. It couldn't wait to get going, but then, having gotten going, it seemed in very little hurry to move on. -- Bill Bryson
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The atoms that so liberally and congenially flock together to form living things on Earth are exactly the same atoms that decline to do it elsewhere. -- Bill Bryson
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satisfyingly dizzying -- Bill Bryson
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Of the total surface area of Earth, Britain occupies just 0.0174069 per cent. -- Bill Bryson
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The Greater London Development Plan would have cost a then-colossal £2 billion, making it the biggest public investment ever made in Britain. That was its salvation. Britain couldn't afford it. In the end, the visionaries were undone by the unmanageable scale of their own ambitions. It -- Bill Bryson
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He called it a mastodon (which means, a touch unexpectedly, "nipple-teeth"). -- Bill Bryson
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By modern standards the whole of greater London, including Southwark and Westminster, was small. It stretched only about two miles from north to south and three from east to west, and could be crossed on foot in not much more than an hour. -- Bill Bryson
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We flatter ourselves. Most of the real diversity in evolution has been small-scale. We large things are just flukes - an interesting side branch. -- Bill Bryson
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Only twenty-six British universities have total endowments greater than the amount given annually to the Ohio State University football team. I -- Bill Bryson
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In America, Benjamin Franklin famously risked his life by flying a kite in an electrical storm. -- Bill Bryson
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The average asteroid actually will be about one and a half million kilometres from its nearest neighbour. -- Bill Bryson
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It is easy to overlook the thought that life just is. As humans we are inclined to feel that life must have a point.We have plans and aspirations and desires. We want to take constant advantage of all the intoxicating existence we've been endowed with. -- Bill Bryson
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Every second a hundred bolts of lightning streak to Earth across the globe as the electric charges that build up within storm clouds are attracted by the positively charged ground. Earth experiences about 40,000 thunderstorms a day. -- Bill Bryson
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Steller's sea cow, named after the German naturalist Georg Steller, who discovered a small community of them living on Bering Island, off the coat of Siberia, in 1741. Hunted mercilessly by humans, within thirty years of its discovery by Steller this remarkable species was extinct. -- Bill Bryson
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I can't imagine there has ever been a more gratifying time or place to be alive than America in the 1950s. No country had ever known such prosperity. -- Bill Bryson
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What a joy walking is. All the cares of life, all the hopeless, inept fuckwits that God has strewn along the Bill Bryson Highway of Life suddenly seem far away and harmless, and the world becomes tranquil and welcoming and good. -- Bill Bryson
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Many fishermen "fin" sharks - that is, slice their fins off, then dump them back into the water to die. -- Bill Bryson
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You are totally at the mercy of nature in this country, mate. It's just a fact of life. -- Bill Bryson
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Percy Bysshe (the only poet named for the sound of a match hitting water), -- Bill Bryson
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paradise for people who look as if they have just stepped out of a Barbour catalogue. -- Bill Bryson
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Nobody deserves to go to the World Series more than the Chicago Cubs. But they can't go because that would spoil their custom of never going. It is an irreconcilable paradox. -- Bill Bryson
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Protons give an atom its identity, electrons its personality. -- Bill Bryson
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Margaret Atwood, J.G. Ballard, Ray Bradbury, Jim Crace, Arthur C. Clarke, Russell Hoban, Anna Kavan, Doris Lessing, Cormac McCarthy, Walter M. Miller, Tim O'Brien, Will Self and Marcel Theroux, -- Bill Bryson
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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. -- Bill Bryson
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It would be hard to think of a more overlooked person in the history of palaeontology than Mary Anning, -- Bill Bryson
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I don't want to go and start trying to make jokes in places like India, Tanzania or Iraq. Afghanistan is not a funny place. -- Bill Bryson
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I grew up in Des Moines. My dad had a house full of books, things like P.G. Wodehouse books and 'Wuthering Heights' by Emily Bronte. -- Bill Bryson
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Even Scientific American entered the fray with an article proposing that the person portrayed in the famous Martin Droeshout engraving might actually be
I weep to say it
Elizabeth I. -- Bill Bryson
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Carleton Coon of the University of Pennsylvania suggested that some modern races have different sources of origin, implying that some of us come from superior stock to others. -- Bill Bryson
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Poor lighting, absence of handrails, confusing patterns on the treads, risers that are unusually high or low, treads that are unusually wide or narrow, and landings that interrupt the rhythm of ascent or descent are the principal design faults that lead to accidents. -- Bill Bryson
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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
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The older you get the more it seems the world belongs to other people. -- Bill Bryson
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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
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It struck me, not for the first time, that there seemed to be more places in Australia for tourists to go than there were tourists to fill them. At -- Bill Bryson
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Occasionally, he would exclaim over a view or regard with admiration some passing marvel of nature, but mostly to him hiking was a tiring, dirty, pointless slog between distantly spaced comfort zones. -- Bill Bryson
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A foreigner could be excused for thinking that to know set is to know English. -- Bill Bryson
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Mispronouncing "buoy." The thing that floats in a navigation channel is not a "boo-ee." It's a "boy." Think about it. Would you call something that floats "boo-ee-ant"? Also, in a similar vein, pronouncing Brett Favre's last name as if the "r" comes before the "v." It doesn't, so stop it. Hotel -- Bill Bryson
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I really enjoy going to a library and spending the day doing research - to me that is the most pleasurable part of writing the science book. -- Bill Bryson
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Physics is really nothing more than a search for ultimate simplicity, but so far all we have is a kind of elegant messiness. -- Bill Bryson
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It was interesting, I thought, that the memorial to Tip was grander than the memorial to the men who took part in the dam-busters raids, but then I remembered that this was England and Tip was a dog. -- Bill Bryson
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According to Time Out magazine, at any given moment there are 600,000 people on the Underground, making it both a larger and more interesting place than Oslo. -- Bill Bryson
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It is fairly amazing to reflect that at the beginning of the twentieth century, and for some years beyond, the best scientific minds in the world couldn't actually tell you, in any meaningful way, where babies came from. -- Bill Bryson
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his facetious grace in writing," and much else. -- Bill Bryson
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There is no such thing, incidentally, as one kudo. -- Bill Bryson
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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. But -- Bill Bryson
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They climbed back into the dish with brooms and scrubbing brushes and carefully swept it clean of what they referred to in a later paper as "white dielectric material," or what is known more commonly as bird shit. -- Bill Bryson
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Finally, but perhaps above all, human nature is a factor in all this. Scientists have a natural tendency to interpret finds in the way that most flatters their stature. -- Bill Bryson
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And thus I was to be found, in the first week of June, standing on the banks of the Shenandoah again, in Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, blinking at a grey sky and trying to pretend that with all my heart this was where I wanted to be. -- Bill Bryson
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For a long time, I'd been vaguely fascinated by the idea that Charles Lindbergh flew the Atlantic and Babe Ruth hit 60 home runs in the same summer. -- Bill Bryson
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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
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Travelling faster than a bullet, an incoming meteor would be moving much too swiftly to be seen, much less to provoke alarm. (Credit -- Bill Bryson
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Antoni van Leeuwenhoek, painted here by his friend Jan Vermeer, was a self-taught instrument maker. -- Bill Bryson
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The thing about Ayers Rock is that by the time you finally get there you are already a little sick of it. -- Bill Bryson
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But the thing is, most of the time bad things don't happen. Rocks don't fall. Earthquakes don't occur. New vents don't suddenly open up. For all the instability, it's mostly remarkably and amazingly tranquil. -- Bill Bryson
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We know also that she had three children with William Shakespeare - Susanna in May 1583 and the twins, Judith and Hamnet, in early February 1585 - but all the rest is darkness. We know nothing about the couple's relationship - whether they bickered constantly or were eternally doting. -- Bill Bryson
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On average the total walking of an American these days
that's walking of all types: from car to office, from office to car, around the supermarket and shopping malls
adds up to 1.4 miles a week, barely 350 yards a day. That's ridiculous. -- Bill Bryson
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Nearly 250 daily newspapers folded in the decade after the birth of network radio. -- Bill Bryson
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I had to drive to Minneapolis once, and went on a back road just to see the country. But there was nothing to see. It's just flat and hot, and full of corn and soybeans and hogs. Every once in a while you come across a farm or some dead little town where the liveliest thing is the flies. -- Bill Bryson
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This is comfortable and clean and familiar. Apart from a tendency among men of a certain age to wear knee-high socks with shorts, these people are just like you and me. -- Bill Bryson
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It may not look it, but all the glass on Earth is flowing downwards under the relentless drag of gravity. Remove a pane of really old glass from the window of a European cathedral and it will be noticeably thicker at the bottom than at the top. -- Bill Bryson
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The disputes are entertainingly surveyed in Charles Elliott's The Potting-Shed Papers. -- Bill Bryson
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I somberly reflected that the history of the Highlands is five hundred years of cruelty and bloodshed followed by two hundred years of way too much bagpipe music. -- Bill Bryson
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I love a sunburnt country, A land of sweeping plains, Of ragged mountain ranges, Of droughts and flooding rains. -- Bill Bryson
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Balchen happened to be at the wheel." This was breathtakingly disingenuous. In fact, Balchen had been flying for hours and very probably saved all their lives with his skillful landing. The -- Bill Bryson
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Roads get wider and busier and less friendly to pedestrians. And all of the development based around cars, like big sprawling shopping malls. Everything seems to be designed for the benefit of the automobile and not the benefit of the human being. -- Bill Bryson
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Look at a globe and what you are seeing really is a snapshot of the continents as they have been for just one-tenth of 1 per cent of the earths history. -- Bill Bryson
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Linguist say parties in the conversation will tolerate silence for four seconds before interjecting anything, however unrelated. -- Bill Bryson
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There'd never been a more advantageous time to be a criminal in America than during the 13 years of Prohibition. At a stroke, the American government closed down the fifth largest industry in the United States - alcohol production - and just handed it to criminals - a pretty remarkable thing to do. -- Bill Bryson
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Confused and unable to help, my hair went into panic mode. -- Bill Bryson
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BEFORE HE CAME INTO a lot of money in 1839, Richard Plantagenet Temple Nugent Brydges Chandos Grenville, second Duke of Buckingham and Chandos, led a largely uneventful life. -- Bill Bryson
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At 2 P.M., two long, cold hours after starting, Everett concluded his speech to thunderous applause - motivated, one is bound to suspect, more by the joy of realizing it was over than by any message derived from the content - and -- Bill Bryson
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There is something about the momentum of travel that makes you want to just keep moving, to never stop. -- Bill Bryson
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Why is it, I wondered, that old people are always so self-centered and excitable? But I just smiled benignly and stood back, comforted by the thought that soon they would be dead. -- Bill Bryson
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I had a hangover you could sell to science, -- Bill Bryson
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The number of people on whose cooperative efforts your eventual existence depends has risen to approximately 1,000,000,000,000,000,000, which is several thousand times the total number of people who have ever lived. -- Bill Bryson
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Part of the reason people could eat so well was that many foods that we now think of as delicacies were plenteous then. Lobsters bred in such abundance around Britain's coastline that they were fed to prisoners and orphans or ground up for fertilizer. -- Bill Bryson
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Entirely incidentally, a little-known fact about Shakespeare is that his father moved to Stratford-upon-Avon from a nearby village shortly before his son's birth. Had he not done so, the Bard of Avon would instead be known as the rather less ringing Bard of Snitterfield. -- Bill Bryson
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The remarkable position in which we find ourselves is that we don't actually know what we actually know. -- Bill Bryson
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Making English grammar conform to Latin rules is like asking people to play baseball using the rules of football. -- Bill Bryson
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Human beings would split the atom and invent television, nylon, and instant coffee before they could figure out the age of their own planet. -- Bill Bryson
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England?" she said with unreserved amazement. "Why do you live in England?" "Because it is nothing like Indianapolis -- Bill Bryson
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In Russia there are no native words for efficiency, challenge, engagement ring, have fun, or take care -- Bill Bryson
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The real significance of Magellan's voyage was not that it was the first to circumnavigate the planet, but that it was the first to realize just how big that planet was. -- Bill Bryson
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A sign in the yard of a church next door said CHRIST IS THE ANSWER. (The question, of course, is: What do you say when you strike your thumb with a hammer?) -- Bill Bryson
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I had no idea that the Scottish so loathed the English that their favorite team in the world is whichever one is presently playing England. -- Bill Bryson
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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. -- Bill Bryson
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And so one more to the wandering road. Beyond Blackheath the highway began a steep and curvaceous descent towards Lithgow, where it skirted along hem of the mountains ... -- Bill Bryson
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Consider the Lichen. Lichens are just about the hardiest visible organisms on Earth, but the least ambitious. -- Bill Bryson
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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
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A world without newspapers or a world where the newspapers are purely electronic and you read them on a screen is not a very appealing world. -- Bill Bryson
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In Australia and the Americas," says Tim Flannery, "the animals probably didn't know enough to run away. -- Bill Bryson
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The upshot of all this is that we live in a universe whose age we can't quite compute, surrounded by stars whose distances we don't altogether know, filled with matter we can't identify, operating in conformance with physical laws whose properties we don't truly understand. -- Bill Bryson
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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. -- Bill Bryson
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Nor, strictly speaking, is it correct to call them Puritans. They were Separatists, so called because they had left the Church of England. Puritans were those who remained in the Anglican Church but wished to purify it. -- Bill Bryson
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The point to remember, of course, when considering the universe at large is that we don't actually know what is in our own solar system. Now, -- Bill Bryson
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We don't know if he ever left England. We don't know who his principal companions were or how he amused himself. His sexuality is an irreconcilable mystery. On only a handful of days in his life can we say with absolute certainty where he was. -- Bill Bryson
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If we should be worrying about anything to do with the future of English, it should not be that the various strands will drift apart but that they will grow indistinguishable. And what a sad, sad loss that would be. -- Bill Bryson
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I come from Des Moines. Someone had to. -- Bill Bryson
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But I love to drink. I can't help it. I mean, I love it Bryson-love the taste, love that buzz you get when you've had a couple, love the smell and feel of the taverns. I miss dirty jokes and the click of pool balls in the background, and that kind of bluish, under lit glow of a bar at night. -- Bill Bryson
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From an evolutionary point of view, sex is really just a reward mechanism to encourage us to pass on our genetic material. -- Bill Bryson
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The red shift gives the speed at which galaxies are retiring, but doesn't tell us how far away they are to begin with. -- Bill Bryson
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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, Des Moines is a mecca of cosmopolitanism -- Bill Bryson
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Hardly anyone ever leaves. This is because Des Moines is the most powerful hypnotic known to man. Outside town there is a big sign that says, WELCOME TO DES MOINES. THIS IS WHAT DEATH IS LIKE. There isn't really. I just made that up. But the place does get a grip on you. -- Bill Bryson
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I come Des Moines. Somebody had to. -- Bill Bryson
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Much as I resented having to grow up in Des Moines, it gave me a real appreciation for every place in the world that's not Des Moines. -- Bill Bryson
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The World Wildlife Fund estimated in 1994 that the number of sharks killed each year was between 40 million and 70 million. As -- Bill Bryson
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It is remarkable to think that we have had electric lights and telephones for about as long as we have known that germs kill people. -- Bill Bryson
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Romans park their cars the way I would park if I had just spilled a beaker of hydrochloric acid on my lap. -- Bill Bryson
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Everywhere throughout New England you find old, tumbledown field walls, often in the middle of the deepest, most settled- looking woods- a reminder of just how swiftly nature reclaims the land in America. -- Bill Bryson
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I can tell you at once that nothing you touch today will have more bloodshed, suffering, and woe attached to it than the innocuous twin pillars of your salt and pepper set. -- Bill Bryson
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began to feel that queasy guilt that you can only know if you have lived among the English - a terrible suspicion that any pleasure involving more than a cup of milky tea and a chocolate digestive biscuit is somehow irreligiously excessive. -- Bill Bryson
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Australia is just so full of surprises. -- Bill Bryson
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Louis Agassiz, the Swiss naturalist who became the most outspoken advocate of the idea that much of Earth had once been covered in ice, but alienated many in the process. -- Bill Bryson
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I'm not a natural story-teller. Put a keyboard in front of me and I'm fine, but stand me up in front of an audience and I'm actually quite shy and reserved. -- Bill Bryson
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His colleague Richard Feynman wanted to call these new basic particles partons16, as in Dolly, but was over-ruled. Instead they became known as quarks. -- Bill Bryson
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Strange as it may seem, wrote Richard Feynman, we understand the distribution of matter in the interior of the Sun far better than we understand the interior of the Earth. -- Bill Bryson
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Not writing the same kind of book over and over again is to me the real pleasure of what I do. -- Bill Bryson
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In 1907, or so it has sometimes been written, Albert Einstein saw a workman fall off a roof and began to think about gravity. Alas, like many good stories this one appears to be apocryphal. According to Einstein himself, he was simply sitting in a chair when the problem of gravity occurred to him. -- Bill Bryson
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So the first dinosaur bone ever found was also the first to be lost. -- Bill Bryson
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When the poet Paul Valery once asked Albert Einstein if he kept a notebook to record his ideas, Einstein looked at him with mild but genuine surprise. "Oh, that's not necessary," he replied . "It's so seldom I have one. -- Bill Bryson
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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
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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. -- Bill Bryson
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There is only one place, an inconspicuous outpost of the Milky Way called the Earth, that will sustain you, and even it can be pretty grudging. From -- Bill Bryson
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We're going to be in the wilderness in three days. There won't be doughnut stores. -- Bill Bryson
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The great failure in education, much of the time, is the lack of excitement and stimulus -- Bill Bryson
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Sumptuary laws, as they were known, laid down precisely, if preposterously, who could wear what. -- Bill Bryson
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Nothing, however, bemused the Indians more than the European habit of blowing their noses into a fine handkerchief, folding it carefully, and placing it back in their pockets as if it were a treasured memento. -- Bill Bryson
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Assumed to be australopithecines because there are no other known candidates. I -- Bill Bryson
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before 1923 there was almost no lead in the atmosphere, and that since that time lead levels had climbed steadily and dangerously. -- Bill Bryson
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Extraordinarily, Heaviside didn't bother to patent his invention. The patent was filed instead by AT&T, which had nothing to do with the discovery but nonetheless went on to become one of the largest corporations in the world thanks in large part to its unrivaled lead in long-distance telephony. -- Bill Bryson
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We are not only what we do, we are also what we imagine. -- Bill Bryson
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Loony hillbillies destabilized by gross quantities of impure corn liquor and generations of profoundly unbiblical sex; -- Bill Bryson
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A year in Vermont, according to an old saw, is nine months of winter followed by three months of very poor sledding. -- Bill Bryson
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They were Republicans, Nixon Republicans, and so didn't subscribe to the notion that laws are supposed to apply to all people equally. -- Bill Bryson
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Although nothing is known about the origin of the painting or where it was for much of the time before it came into the Chandos family in 1747, it has been said for a long time to be of William Shakespeare. -- Bill Bryson
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Houses aren't refuges from history. They are where history ends up. -- Bill Bryson
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The queen also toyed with the idea of making the whole of St. James's Park private, and asked her prime minister, Robert Walpole, how much that would cost. "Only a crown, Madam," he replied with a thin smile. -- Bill Bryson
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ancient light in -- Bill Bryson
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The bone was sent to Dr. Caspar Wistar, the nation's leading anatomist, who described it at a meeting of the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia that autumn. -- Bill Bryson
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... I would submit that if you think the only people you should have in your country are the people you produce yourselves, you are an idiot. -- Bill Bryson
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I suppose all our lives must be at the end of a long chain of improbable coincidences, -- Bill Bryson
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I can wear a baseball cap; I am entitled to wear a baseball cap. I am genetically pre-disposed to wear a baseball cap, whereas most English people look wrong in a baseball cap. -- Bill Bryson
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It wasn't until the 1860s, and some landmark work by Louis Pasteur in France, that it was shown conclusively that life cannot arise spontaneously but must come from pre-existing cells. -- Bill Bryson
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"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
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Because time moves more slowly in Kid World ... it goes on for decades ... It is adult life that is over in a twinkling. -- Bill Bryson
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Take it from me, if you are in an open space with no weapons and a grizzly comes for you, run. You may as well. If nothing else, it will give you something to do with the last seven seconds of your life. -- Bill Bryson
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There are three stages in scientific discovery. First, people deny that it is true, then they deny that it is important; finally they credit the wrong person. -- Bill Bryson
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I sometimes think I cannot write another passage about a disappointing meal ever again, because I've done it so many times. -- Bill Bryson
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I love to watch cities wake up, and Paris wakes up more abruptly, more startlingly, than any place I know. -- Bill Bryson
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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
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For the moment we might very well call them DUNNOS (for Dark Unknown Nonreflective Nondetectable Objects Somewhere). Recent -- Bill Bryson
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I always tell people there's only one trick to writing: You have to write something that people are willing to pay money to read. It doesn't have to be very good, necessarily, but somebody, somewhere, has got to be willing to pay money for it. -- Bill Bryson
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To be sure, Wegener made mistakes. He asserted that Greenland is drifting west at about 1.6 kilometres a year, a clear nonsense. (Its more like a centimetre.) -- Bill Bryson
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We should have a definitive total for insects in a little over fifteen thousand years. -- Bill Bryson
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I've never quite understood that feeling: that you arrive in a strange place, yet you want to have nothing but familiar experiences. -- Bill Bryson
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The transit of Venus of 1769 finally allowed us to determine the distance from the Earth to the Sun: 149.59 million kilometres. A -- Bill Bryson
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We are so used to having a lot of comfort in our lives - to being clean, warm, and well fed - that we forget how recent most of that is. In fact, achieving these things took forever, and then they mostly came in a rush. -- Bill Bryson
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As I always used to tell Thomas Wolfe, there are three 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. -- Bill Bryson
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Sometimes the world just isn't ready for a good idea. -- Bill Bryson
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It is an intoxicating experience to taste Coca-Cola as if for the first time and to be conveyed to the very brink of orgasm by white bread. Makes all the discomfort worthwhile, if you ask me. -- Bill Bryson
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How stupid of me not to have thought of it! T. H. Huxley cried upon reading On the Origin of Species. It is a view that has been echoed ever since. Interestingly, -- Bill Bryson
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I often feel I'm a disappointment to people because they expect me to be the guy in the books. When I sit next to someone at a dinner party I can see they expect me to be quick and witty, and I'm not at all. -- Bill Bryson
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I love the feeling of being anonymous in a city I've never been before. -- Bill Bryson
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It is always quietly thrilling to find yourself looking at a world you know well but have never seen from such an angle before. -- Bill Bryson
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journal Science in 1980 contending that women are genetically inferior at mathematics. -- Bill Bryson
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The universe is an amazingly fickle and eventful place, and our existence within is a wonder. -- Bill Bryson
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You don't need a science degree to understand about science. You just need to think about it. -- Bill Bryson
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Wallace, King and Sanders point out in Biology: The Science of Life (that rarest thing: a readable textbook), -- Bill Bryson
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Of all the disciplines in science, paleoanthropology boasts perhaps the largest share of egos, -- Bill Bryson
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Energy is liberated matter, matter is energy waiting to happen. -- Bill Bryson
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Language, never forget, is more fashion than science, and matters of usage, spelling and pronunciation tend to wander around like hemlines. -- Bill Bryson
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Only one thing is certain: we live on a knife edge. In -- Bill Bryson
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The basic challenge of any book is you know you're going to be working on it for three or four years or more. So you want to have a subject that will keep you engaged. -- Bill Bryson
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(his house at Stowe, in Buckinghamshire, had nine of the first flush toilets in England), -- Bill Bryson
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Prohibition may be the greatest gift any government ever gave its citizens. A barrel of beer cost $4 to make and sold for $55. A case of spiritous liquor cost $20 to produce and earned $90
and all this without taxes. -- Bill Bryson
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the basement. Katz -- Bill Bryson
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You have three chromosomes, Bryson. X, Y, and Fuckhead.
Katz -- Bill Bryson
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No one knows, incidentally, why Australia's spiders are so extravagantly toxic; capturing small insects and injecting them with enough poison to drop a horse would appear to be the most literal case of overkill. Still, it does mean that everyone gives them lots of space. -- Bill Bryson
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In the first few days, I failed to distinguish between collar and color, khaki and car key, letters and lettuce, bed and bared, karma and calmer. Needing -- Bill Bryson
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That is the most extraordinary fact about Britain. It wants to be a garden. Flowers bloom in the unlikeliest places - on railway sidings and waste grounds where there is nothing beneath them but rubble and grit. -- Bill Bryson
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In the 1960s, the Stanford historian Peter Laslett did a careful study of British marriage records and found that at no time in the recorded past did people regularly marry at very early ages. Between 1619 and 1660, for instance, 85 percent of women were nineteen -- Bill Bryson
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The main expressed goal for oceanographers during International Geophysical Year, 1957/8, was to study "the use of ocean depths for the dumping of radioactive wastes." This wasn't a secret assignment, you understand, but a proud public boast. In -- Bill Bryson
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As the economist Herman Daly once put it: The current national accounting system treats the earth as a business in liquidation. -- Bill Bryson
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I understand cricket - what's going on, the scoring - but I can't understand why. -- Bill Bryson
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It took Read some twenty years of searching to nail the matter down, but thanks to his efforts we now know that OK first appeared in print in the Boston Morning Post on 23 March 1839, as a jocular abbreviation for 'Oll Korrect'. At -- Bill Bryson
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Every day in every way I am getting better and better.* -- Bill Bryson
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Britain still has the most reliably beautiful countryside of anywhere in the world. I would hate to be part of the generation that allowed that to be lost. -- Bill Bryson
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stromatolites - a kind of living rock made by billions and billions of microscopic cyanobacteria. The tiny respirations of these organisms over millions of years largely created Earth's oxygen-rich atmosphere, paving the way for more complex living things. -- Bill Bryson
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The one word that Newfoundland has given the world is penguin. No one has any idea what inspired it. -- Bill Bryson
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Thoreau was an idiot. -- Bill Bryson
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Life just wants to be; but it doesn't want to be much. -- Bill Bryson
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How fast a man's beard grows, for instance, is partly a function of how much he thinks about sex (because thinking about sex produces a testosterone surge). -- Bill Bryson
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There are two problems with notions of panspermia, as extraterrestrial theories are known. -- Bill Bryson
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It is often noted, for instance, that Shakespeare's plays are full of ocean metaphors ("take arms against a sea of troubles," "an ocean of salt tears," "wild sea of my conscience") and that every one of his plays has at least one reference to the sea in it somewhere. -- Bill Bryson
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Well over a million years ago, some new, comparatively modern, upright beings left Africa and boldly spread out across much of the globe. -- Bill Bryson
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Female academics at King's in the 1950s were treated with a formalized disdain that -- Bill Bryson
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I like being in a country where when cows attack, word of it gets around. That's what I mean when I say Britain is cozy. -- Bill Bryson
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Four times I was honked at for having the temerity to proceed through town without the benefit of metal. -- Bill Bryson
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My first rule of consumerism is never to buy anything you can't make your children carry. -- Bill Bryson
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In 1986, The Economist assembled a list of English terms that had become more or less universal. They were: airport, passport, hotel, telephone, bar, soda, cigarette, sport, golf, tennis, stop, O.K., weekend, jeans, know-how, sex appeal, and no problem. -- Bill Bryson
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It sometimes occurs to me that the British have more heritage than is good for them. In a country where there is so astonishingly much of everything, it is easy to look on it as a kind of inexhaustible resource. -- Bill Bryson
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Before, prior to. There is no difference between these two except length and a certain affectedness on the part of 'prior to.' To paraphrase Bernstein, if you would use 'posterior to' instead of 'after,' then by all means use 'prior to' instead of 'before. -- Bill Bryson
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while - for a couple of minutes - it's actually -- Bill Bryson
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Pluto is about 40 AUs from us, the heart of the Oort cloud about fifty thousand. In a word, it is remote. But -- Bill Bryson
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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
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It is the patchiness of the record that makes each new find look so sudden and distinct from all the others. -- Bill Bryson
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When you write books for a living, you come to realize that while not all people who write to authors are strange, all people who are strange write to authors. -- Bill Bryson
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like physics before it," Woese wrote, "has moved to a level where the objects of interest and their interactions often cannot be perceived through direct observation." In -- Bill Bryson
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My first rule of travel is never to go to a place that sounds like a medical condition and Critz is clearly an incurable disease involving flaking skin. -- Bill Bryson
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Glance at the night sky and what you see is history and lots of it - not the stars as they are now but as they were when their light left them. -- Bill Bryson
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Electric jugs for all. -- Bill Bryson
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Galaxies of the universe are racing away from us, but that they are doing so at a rate that is accelerating. -- Bill Bryson
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Have you ever seen Glenn Beck in operation? It is the most terrifying thing. It's so bad that you think he's going to announce in a minute that it's all a great con. He makes Sarah Palin look reasonable and steady. -- Bill Bryson
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It is an interesting experience to become acquainted with a country through the eyes of the insane, and, if I may say so, a particularly useful grounding for life in Britain. -- Bill Bryson
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I want things to be better all the time. And I tend to get angry about that. Books are an opportunity to vent. -- Bill Bryson
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Even with the benefit of steroids most modern players still couldn't hit as many home runs as Babe Ruth hit on hotdogs. -- Bill Bryson
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America has given us a pretty decent modern world and doesn't always get enough thanks for that. But for reasons that genuinely escape me, it has also become spectacularly accommodating to stupidity. Where -- Bill Bryson
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Life on Earth, you see, is not only brief but dismayingly tenuous. -- Bill Bryson
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The body is in constant danger of being depleted by a greedy brain, but cannot afford to let the brain go hungry as that would rapidly lead to death. -- Bill Bryson
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The core of a neutron star is so dense that a single spoonful of matter from it would weigh more than 500 billion kilograms. -- Bill Bryson
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It has sometimes been said that prudery reached such a height in the nineteenth century that people took to dressing their piano legs in little skirts lest they rouse anyone to untimely passion. Thomas -- Bill Bryson
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99.99 percent of all species that have ever lived are no longer with us. -- Bill Bryson
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Brain cells last as long as you do. You are issued with a hundred billion or so at birth and that is all you are ever going to get. It has been estimated that you lose five hundred of them an hour, so if you have any serious thinking to do there really isn't a moment to waste. -- Bill Bryson
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Life emerged so swiftly, in fact, that some authorities think it must have had help - perhaps a good deal of help. -- Bill Bryson
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tiny bag of chemicals twitched and became animate. We were on our way. Four -- Bill Bryson
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The New York Times, with what was threatening to become a customary lack of prescience, forecast that it would never be a serious competitor for radio because "people must sit and keep their eyes glued on a screen; the average American family hasn't time for it."34 -- Bill Bryson
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The world at night, for much of history, was a very dark place indeed. -- Bill Bryson
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Nether Hambleton and Middle Hambleton -- Bill Bryson
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We live in a world that has practically no appreciation for quality, tradition, or classiness, and in which people who can't spell even common words get to decide what survives. That -- Bill Bryson
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In nearly every year for at least 250 years, deaths outnumbered births in London. -- Bill Bryson
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And let's face it, the French Army couldn't beat a girls hockey team -- Bill Bryson
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Goldilocks effect" - that everything is just right. (For the record, these three possible universes are known respectively as closed, open and flat.) Now, -- Bill Bryson
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The universe is not only queerer than we suppose; it is queerer than we can suppose -- Bill Bryson
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One idea to a sentence is still the best advice that anyone has ever given on writing. -- Bill Bryson
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Whatever prompted life to begin, it happened just once. That is the most extraordinary fact in biology, perhaps the most extraordinary fact we know. -- Bill Bryson
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Robert G. Elliott was not a murderous person by nature, but he proved, no doubt to his own surprise, to be rather good at killing people. -- Bill Bryson
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Two billion years bacterial organisms were the only forms of life. They lived, they reproduced, they swarmed, but they didn't show any particular inclination to move on to another, more challenging level of existence. -- Bill Bryson
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Homo erectus was the first to hunt, the first to use fire, the first to fashion complex tools, the first to leave evidence of campsites, the first to look after the weak and frail. -- Bill Bryson
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Do you know," he said, "it's twenty years since you wrote Notes from a Small Island?" (This was my first book about Britain. It did awfully well there.) "Twenty years?" I replied, amazed at how much past one can accumulate without any effort at all. -- Bill Bryson
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he also engaged in many charitable works, notably the building of one of the world's largest orphanages for boys (and boys alone; orphan girls would have to look elsewhere) -- Bill Bryson
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Nearly 90 per cent of the planet's ice is in Antarctica and most of the rest is in Greenland. -- Bill Bryson
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This wouldn't be so bad, I told myself. But secretly, I knew that I was quite wrong. -- Bill Bryson
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Dark matter, which is invisible to us and yet is believed to account for 90 per cent, or more, of all the matter in the universe. Dark matter was first theorized in the 1930s by Fritz Zwicky, -- Bill Bryson
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You can't go to East Anglia and not visit Sutton Hoo. Well, you can, obviously, but you shouldn't. -- Bill Bryson
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What moves the planets and stars is the distortion of space and time. Of -- Bill Bryson
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I see litter as part of a long continuum of anti-social behaviour. -- Bill Bryson
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No less than 99.5 per cent of the world's habitable space by volume, according to one estimate, is fundamentally - in practical terms completely - off limits to us. It -- Bill Bryson
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ocean floors everywhere were so comparatively youthful. None had ever been found to be older than about 175 million years, which was a puzzle because continental rocks were often billions of years old. -- Bill Bryson
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To an American the whole purpose of living, the one constant confirmation of continued existence, is to cram as much as sensual pleasure as possible into one's mouth more or less continuously. Gratification, instant and lavish, is a birthright -- Bill Bryson
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The remote valley of Lake Turkana (formerly Lake Rudolf) in Kenya is now one of the world's most productive sites for early human remains, -- Bill Bryson
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A modern-day conservator of Monticello says that Woodmont Jefferson as an amateur architect rather than a professional was that he made things more complicated than they needed to be for any practical purpose. -- Bill Bryson
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The most celebrated germ expert in the world is almost certainly Dr. Charles P. Gerba of the University of Arizona, who is so devoted to the field that he gave one of his children the middle name Escherichia, after the bacterium Escherichia coli. -- Bill Bryson
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If the mattress stains were anything to go by, a previous user had not so much suffered from incontinence as rejoiced in it. -- Bill Bryson
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There is no reason why we shouldn't be able to split an infinitive, any more than we should forsake instant coffee and air travel because they weren't available to the Romans. -- Bill Bryson
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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. -- Bill Bryson
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She was torn between her customer service training and her youthful certitude. -- Bill Bryson
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I turned to my own bunk and examined it with a kind of appalled fascination. If the mattress stains were anything to go by, a previous user had not so much suffered from incontinence as rejoiced in it. He had evidently included the pillow in his celebrations. -- Bill Bryson
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Most people when they nod off look as if they could do with a blanket; I look as if I could do with medical attention. I sleep as if injected with a powerful experimental muscle relaxant. -- Bill Bryson
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Somehow, from this Gilbert concluded that the Moon's craters were indeed formed by impacts - in itself quite a radical notion for the time - but -- Bill Bryson
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The real problem you get with humour is that you only have so many kinds of jokes within you, and you mine that vein a lot. This isn't just common to me; it's anybody who's funny. -- Bill Bryson
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There is no law that requires the universe to fill itself with small particles of matter or to produce light and gravity and the other properties on which our existence hinges. -- Bill Bryson
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Nobody gets excited about the future at all, ever. The future is something we find depressing and worrisome. -- Bill Bryson
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People in New York go to Calcutta to get some relief from begging -- Bill Bryson
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In 1956 he was found to be carrying a large and diversified collection of pornographic material, and he was invited to take his sordid continental habits elsewhere. Thus he was unable to enjoy, as it were, his own finest erection. -- Bill Bryson
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Germans are flummoxed by humor, the Swiss have no concept of fun, the Spanish think there is nothing at all ridiculous about eating dinner at midnight, and the Italians should never, ever have been let in on the invention of the motor car. -- Bill Bryson
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But perhaps nothing speaks more clearly for the absurdities of English pronunciation than that the word for the study of pronunciation in English, orthoepy, can itself be pronounced two ways. -- Bill Bryson
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I would sooner have bowel surgery in the woods with a stick. -- Bill Bryson
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The best that can be said for Norwegian television is that it gives you the sensation of a coma without the worry and inconvenience. -- Bill Bryson
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And then you might learn, as we did from a local, that the reason hundreds of starlings in flight will twist and turn in unison is because the ones on the outside are constantly trying to get to the inside where they feel safer. Some -- Bill Bryson
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As a student, frustrated by the limitations of conventional mathematics, he invented an entirely new form, the calculus, but then told no-one about it for twenty-seven years5. -- Bill Bryson
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The tragedy for so many town councils is that they think they can quietly cut spending and no one will notice or care. The tragedy for the country may be that they are right. But -- Bill Bryson
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It was full of lazy late-afternoon shadows and an impossible green lushness such as could only be appreciated by someone freshly arrived -- Bill Bryson
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Life in Australia would go on, and I would hear nothing, because once you leave Australia, Australia ceases to be. -- Bill Bryson
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among them Pleistocene ("most recent"), Pliocene ("more recent"), Miocene ("moderately recent") and the rather endearingly vague Oligocene ("but a little recent"). -- Bill Bryson
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I was heading to Nebraska. Now there's a sentence you don't want to say too often if you can possibly help it. -- Bill Bryson
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After years of patient study (and with cricket there can be no other kind), I have decided that there is nothing wrong with the game that the introduction of golf carts wouldn't fix in a hurry. -- Bill Bryson
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Hitler and Mussolini even went so far as to persecute Esperanto speakers. -- Bill Bryson
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In the countryside, litter doesn't have a friend. It doesn't have anybody who's saying, 'Wait a minute, this is really starting to get out of control.' -- Bill Bryson
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I hadn't realized quite how extraordinary Charles Lindbergh's achievement was in flying the Atlantic alone. He had never flown over open water before, but he flew straight to Dingle Bay in Ireland and then on to Paris, exactly as planned. -- Bill Bryson
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MACHOs (for MAssive Compact Halo Objects - really just another name for black holes, brown dwarfs and other very dim stars). -- Bill Bryson
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I'm a great believer that you had to do everything you've done to have got to where you are. -- Bill Bryson
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Widespread commercial distribution of ice was so new that 300 tons of the precious commodity melted at one port while customs officials tried to figure out how to classify it. -- Bill Bryson
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There is always a little more toothpaste in the tube. Think about it. -- Bill Bryson
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America is a very seductive place in terms of lifestyle and comfort, but it wasn't for me. -- Bill Bryson
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Work expands to fill the time available for its completion," still known as Parkinson's Law. -- Bill Bryson
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Ah," he said in a tone of genial wisdom, "a chancellor is rather like a bidet. Everyone is pleased to have one, but no one knows quite what they are for." A chancellor is nominally the head of a university, but in practice has no role, no power, no purpose. -- Bill Bryson
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When even camels can't manage a desert, you know you've found a tough part of the world. -- Bill Bryson
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Am not at all sure how we should tackle such a crisis, but on the basis of what we know so far, I would suggest, as a start, quarantining Texas. I -- Bill Bryson
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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
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South Dakota ... is like the world's first drive-through sensory deprivation chamber. -- Bill Bryson
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Nothing gives the English more pleasure, in a quiet but determined sort of way, than to do things oddly. -- Bill Bryson
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She would only make me take my seat if I didn't act calm and Swiss about it all. -- Bill Bryson
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In this sense, according to Harding, every gene is a different highway, and we have only barely begun to map the routes. No single gene is ever going to tell you the whole story, -- Bill Bryson
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It was an especially wonderful time to be a noisy moron. -- Bill Bryson
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You look at the modern humans that a lot of us have slept with and it is hardly a surprise if a Neanderthal maiden or two might have twinkled by the campfire light. -- Bill Bryson
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English bond is a style in which one row is made up entirely of stretchers (the long side of bricks) and the next is made only of headers (the end side). -- Bill Bryson
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Describing his experience with the sting of an extremely toxic jellyfish, he did something you don't often see a scientist do: he shivered. -- Bill Bryson
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The distance from the surface of Earth to the middle is 6,370 kilometres, which isn't so very far. It has been calculated that if you sunk a well to the centre and dropped a brick down it, it would take only forty-five minutes for it to hit the bottom -- Bill Bryson
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I wanted to quit and to do this forever, sleep in a bed and in a tent, see what was over the next hill and never see a hill again. All of this all at once, every moment, on the trail or off. -- Bill Bryson
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Every living thing, never forget, is a wonder of atomic engineering. Indeed, -- Bill Bryson
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It really doesn't pay to go back and look again at the things that once delighted you, because it's unlikely they will delight you now. I -- Bill Bryson
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Beulah has a husband?'
I know. It's a miracle. There can't be more than two people on the planet who'd be willing to sleep with her, and here we are both in the same town. -- Bill Bryson
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the slight evolutionary change that pushed man's larynx deeper into his throat, and thus made choking a possibility, also brought with it the possibility of sophisticated, well-articulated speech. -- Bill Bryson
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published in 1980, John McPhee noted that even then one American geologist in eight still didn't believe in plate tectonics. Today -- Bill Bryson
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I'm definitely an American, because I grew up here. But I've lived very happily in Britain. -- Bill Bryson
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As the biologist J. B. S. Haldane once famously observed: "The universe is not only queerer than we suppose; it is queerer than we can suppose." The -- Bill Bryson
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Eventually, mercifully, the waitress prised the spoons out of our hands and took the dessert stuff away, and we were able to stumble zombielike out into the night. -- Bill Bryson
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Ocean vents harbour some of the most extraordinary life on the planet. -- Bill Bryson
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The youth of Idaho falls should be encouraged to take drugs in order to cope up with the fact that there is plutonium in their drinking water. -- Bill Bryson
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If there's one thing the AT teaches, it is low-level ecstasy - something we could all do with more of in our lives. -- Bill Bryson
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I had always thought that once you grew up you could do anything you wanted - stay up all night or eat ice-cream straight out of the container. -- Bill Bryson
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His point, of course, is that it is easy to make any banal situation seem extraordinary if you treat it as fateful. So -- Bill Bryson
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Physicists are atoms' way of thinking about atoms. -- Bill Bryson
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There is the odd exception, like Albert Einstein, but as a breed, scientists tend not be very good at presenting themselves. -- Bill Bryson
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Based on what we know now and can reasonably imagine, there is absolutely no prospect that any human being will ever visit the edge of our own solar system - ever. -- Bill Bryson
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Person says to you, "How do you do?" he will be taken aback if you reply, with impeccable logic, "How do I do what?" The complexities of the English language are -- Bill Bryson
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On another occasion, he stared at the Sun for as long as he could bear, to determine what effect it would have upon his vision. -- Bill Bryson
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Anyway, as should be obvious, his ability to write or not could have had absolutely no bearing on the capabilities of his children. -- Bill Bryson
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For us, the universe goes only as far as light has travelled in the billions of years since the universe was formed. -- Bill Bryson
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Henry Ford had the additional distinction of being the only American mentioned favorably in Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler's memoir of 1925. -- Bill Bryson
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In short, there is just a great deal we don't know. -- Bill Bryson
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An atmosphere ultraviolet rays from the sun, even from a weak sun, would have tended to break apart any incipient bonds made by molecules. And yet right there" - she tapped the stromatolites - "you have organisms almost at the surface. It's a puzzle. -- Bill Bryson
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One of the brilliant things about Britain is the way you've managed to save old things but to keep using them - that they've not just become museums the way they do in the United States. -- Bill Bryson
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Farther west, Michigan's seemingly inexhaustible stock of white pine - 170 billion board feet of it when the first colonists arrived - shrank by 95 percent in just a century. -- Bill Bryson
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The one thing he didn't do was discover the comet that bears his name. -- Bill Bryson
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In Iowa, we were not used to seeing the houses of well-known people on account of there were no well-known people in Iowa. -- Bill Bryson
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In any area of human endeavour, there is going to be mediocrity. You're going to find people who get money that they shouldn't get. -- Bill Bryson
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I quite like Torquay and might one day come back, but I can tell you this now: where watch batteries are concerned, they can go fuck themselves. -- Bill Bryson
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Supernova explosions could have generated the necessary heat to create the heavy elements that led to the formation of rocky planets and, eventually, us. (credit -- Bill Bryson
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there. I had thought we would have -- Bill Bryson
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Did all that really just happen or have I wandered into some kind of Dada exhibition? -- Bill Bryson
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Forty-two percent of all that was produced in the world was produced in the United States. America made 80 percent of the world's movies and 85 percent of its cars. -- Bill Bryson
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We have a universe. It is a place of most wondrous and gratifying possibility, and beautiful, too. And it was all done in about the time it takes to make a sandwich. -- Bill Bryson
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When I say "most people" I mean, of course, me after my first cocktail. -- Bill Bryson
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Scientists tend to be unappreciated in the world at large, but you can hardly overstate the importance of the work they do. -- Bill Bryson
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Just reaching the centre of our own galaxy would take far longer than we have existed as beings. -- Bill Bryson
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I often use alcohol as an artificial check on my skills. -- Bill Bryson
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Moreover, all this applies only to units of time. Rocks are divided into quite separate units known as systems, series and stages. -- Bill Bryson
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Rat bites are almost certainly under reported because only the most serious cases attract attention, but even using the most conservative figures, at least fourteen thousand people in the United States are attacked by rats each year. -- Bill Bryson
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In three minutes, 98 percent of all the matter there is or will ever be has been produced. We have a universe -- Bill Bryson
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One planet, one experiment." If -- Bill Bryson
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The whole system was based up<>ong>onong> getting kids to a certain standard and packing their minds with informati<>ong>onong> so they could go <>ong>onong> to a good university ... The great failure in educati<>ong>onong>, much of the time, is a lack of excitement and stimulus. -- Bill Bryson
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Most of what has lived on Earth has left behind no record at all. -- Bill Bryson
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Simeon Potter notes that when James II firstrong>ststrong> saw St. Paul's Cathedral he called it amusing, awful, and artificial, and meant that it was pleasing to look at, deserving of awe, and full of skillful artifice. -- Bill Bryson