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There are things you just can't do in life. You can't beat the phone company, you can't make a waiter see you until he's ready to see you, and you can't go home again.

Bill Bryson

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Bill Bryson
Age: 73
Born: 1951
Born: December 8
Author
Autobiographer
Journalist
Science Communicator
Science Writer
Travel Writer
Writer
Des Moines
Iowa
William Bryson
William Bill McGuire Bryson
William McGuire Bryson
Ready
Company
House
Home
Waiter
Make
Phone
Things
Phones
Life
Beat
Beats

More quotes by Bill Bryson

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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.
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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.
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Eating in Sweden is really just a series of heartbreaks.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Consider the Lichen. Lichens are just about the hardiest visible organisms on Earth, but the least ambitious.
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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.
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South Dakota... is like the world's first drive-through sensory deprivation chamber.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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The remarkable position in which we find ourselves is that we don't actually know what we actually know.
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It was an odd situation. For a century and a half, men got rid of their own hair, which was perfectly comfortable, and instead covered their heads with something foreign and uncomfortable. Very often it was actually their own hair made into a wig. People who couldn't afford wigs tried to make their hair look like a wig.
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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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Everything seems to be designed for the benefit of the automobile and not the benefit of the human being.
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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.
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Physicists are atoms' way of thinking about atoms.
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Still, I never really mind bad service in a restaurant. It makes me feel better about not leaving a tip.
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