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We used to build civilizations. Now we build shopping malls.
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
Architecture
Build
Civilization
Used
Civilizations
Malls
Badass
Architect
Shopping
More quotes by Bill Bryson
Romans park their cars the way I would park if I had just spilled a beaker of hydrochloric acid on my lap.
Bill Bryson
The upshot of all this is that we live in a universe whose age we can't quite compute, surrounded by stars whose distances we don't altogether know, filled with matter we can't identify, operating in conformance with physical laws whose properties we don’t truly understand.
Bill Bryson
There are only three things that can kill a farmer: lightning, rolling over in a tractor, and old age.
Bill Bryson
The great failure in education, much of the time, is the lack of excitement and stimulus
Bill Bryson
South Dakota... is like the world's first drive-through sensory deprivation chamber.
Bill Bryson
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.
Bill Bryson
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.
Bill Bryson
Even though sugar was very expensive, people consumed it till their teeth turned black, and if their teeth didn't turn black naturally, they blackened them artificially to show how wealthy and marvelously self-indulgent they were.
Bill Bryson
Germans are flummoxed by humor, the Swiss have no concept of fun, the Spanish think there is nothing at all ridiculous about eating dinner at midnight, and the Italians should never, ever have been let in on the invention of the motor car.
Bill Bryson
I'm not funny in person. I mean I'm really not. I'm one of those people who always screw up anecdotes.
Bill Bryson
You can be a scientist and believe in god: the two can go hand in hand.
Bill Bryson
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.
Bill Bryson
Protons give an atom its identity, electrons its personality.
Bill Bryson
When you consider it from a human perspective, and clearly it would be difficult for us to do otherwise, life is an odd thing. It couldn't wait to get going, but then, having gotten going, it seemed in very little hurry to move on.
Bill Bryson
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.
Bill Bryson
I can't imagine there has ever been a more gratifying time or place to be alive than America in the 1950s. No country had ever known such prosperity.
Bill Bryson
Physicists are atoms' way of thinking about atoms.
Bill Bryson
I come Des Moines. Somebody had to.
Bill Bryson
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.
Bill Bryson
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