Quote

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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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
Years
Feeling
Foolish
Time
Business
Absence
Mildly
Like
Feelings
Discover
Unsettling
Littles
Touch
Coma
Back
Changes
Surprisingly
Little
Coming
Wrought
Many
Leave
Waking
Long
Land
Native

More quotes by 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.
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America is a very seductive place in terms of lifestyle and comfort, but it wasn't for me.
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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.
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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.
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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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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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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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Physics is really nothing more than a search for ultimate simplicity, but so far all we have is a kind of elegant messiness.
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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.
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Nearly a quarter of American men were in the Armed forces. The rest were in school, in prison, or were George W. Bush.
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South Dakota... is like the world's first drive-through sensory deprivation chamber.
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Energy is liberated matter, matter is energy waiting to happen.
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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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I'm not funny in person. I mean I'm really not. I'm one of those people who always screw up anecdotes.
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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.
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The great failure in education, much of the time, is the lack of excitement and stimulus
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Life just wants to be but it doesn't want to be much.
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Physicists are atoms' way of thinking about atoms.
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Eating in Sweden is really just a series of heartbreaks.
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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.
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