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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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Bill Bryson
Age: 72
Born: 1951
Born: December 8
Author
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Journalist
Science Communicator
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Des Moines
Iowa
William Bryson
William Bill McGuire Bryson
William McGuire Bryson
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More quotes by 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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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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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 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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You don't have to know anything about baseball to respond to Babe Ruth because he's just this magnificent human being. And a really good story because he was this kid who grew up essentially as an orphan, you know, had a tough life, and then he became the most successful baseball player ever. But he was also a really good guy.
Bill Bryson
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Protons give an atom its identity, electrons its personality.
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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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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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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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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You may not feel outstandingly robust, but if you are an average-sized adult you will contain within your modest frame no less than 7 X 10^18 joules of potential energy—enough to explode with the force of thirty very large hydrogen bombs, assuming you knew how to liberate it and really wished to make a point.
Bill Bryson
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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.
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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You can be a scientist and believe in god: the two can go hand in hand.
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 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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In terms of adaptability, humans are pretty amazingly useless.
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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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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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