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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.

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
Whether
Seems
Misanthropic
Disappointed
Easily
Constantly

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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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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.
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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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And before long there will be no more milk in bottles delivered to the doorstep or sleepy rural pubs, and the countryside will be mostly shopping centers and theme parks. Forgive me. I don't mean to get upset. But you are taking my world away from me, piece by little piece, and sometimes it just pisses me off. Sorry.
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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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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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... 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.
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I come Des Moines. Somebody had to.
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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.
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I think it's only right that crazy people should have their own city, but I cannot for the life of me see why a sane person would want to go there.
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Consider the Lichen. Lichens are just about the hardiest visible organisms on Earth, but the least ambitious.
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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.
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You can always tell a Midwestern couple in Europe because they will be standing on a traffic island in the middle of a busy intersection looking at a windblown map and arguing over which way is west. European cities, with their wandering streets and undisciplined alleys, drive Midwesterners practically insane.
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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.
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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.
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I tell the kids that, even in a childhood marked by despair and deprivation, I knew that no matter what happened, I still had my family, or at least the remnants of a family ripped apart by divorce and then glued back together in various odd arrangements through a series of ill- advised remarriages. It was good to know I had a solid foundation.
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We used to build civilizations. Now we build shopping malls.
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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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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.
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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