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Cheapness is a great virtue.

Bill Bryson

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Bill Bryson
Age: 72
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
Cheapness
Virtue
Great

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He had the sort of face that makes you realize God does have a sense of humor.
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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.
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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.
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Life just wants to be but it doesn't want to be much.
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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.
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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.
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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
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Eating in Sweden is really just a series of heartbreaks.
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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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Taxonomy is described sometimes as a science and sometimes as an art, but really it’s a battleground.
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People don't talk like this, theytalklikethis. Syllables, words, sentences run together like a watercolour left in the rain. To understand what anyone is saying to us we must separate these noises into words and the words into sentences so that we might in our turn issue a stream of mixed sounds in response.
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My first rule of consumerism is never to buy anything you can't make your children carry.
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There are only three things that can kill a farmer: lightning, rolling over in a tractor, and old age.
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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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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.
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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.
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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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Consider the Lichen. Lichens are just about the hardiest visible organisms on Earth, but the least ambitious.
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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.
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For anyone of a rational disposition, fashion is often nearly impossible to fathom. Throughout many periods of history – perhaps most – it can seem as if the whole impulse of fashion has been to look maximally ridiculous. If one could be maximally uncomfortable as well, the triumph was all the greater.
Bill Bryson