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We used to build civilizations. Now we build shopping malls.

Bill Bryson

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Bill Bryson
Age: 73
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
Build
Civilization
Used
Civilizations
Malls
Badass
Architect
Shopping
Architecture

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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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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.
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Perhaps it's my natural pessimism, but it seems that an awfully large part of travel these days is to see things while you still can.
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Language is more fashion than science, and matters of usage, spelling and pronunciation tend to wander around like hemlines.
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I became quietly seized with that nostalgia that overcomes you when you have reached the middle of your life and your father has recently died and it dawns on you that when he went he took some of you with him.
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I could spend my life arriving each evening in a new city.
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You may find that your parents are the most delightful people, but you don't want to live with them.
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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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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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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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Book tours are really kind of fun. You get to stay in nice hotels, you are driven everywhere in big silver cars, you are treated as if you are much more important than you are, you can eat steak three times a day at someone else's expense, and you get to talk endlessly about yourself for weeks at a stretch.
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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.
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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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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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In three minutes, 98 percent of all the matter there is or will ever be has been produced. We have a universe
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English grammar is so complex and confusing for the one very simple reason that its rules and terminology are based on Latin, a language with which it has precious little in common.
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The universe is not only queerer than we suppose it is queerer than we can suppose
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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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Des Moines is like your typical American city it's just these concentric circles of malls, built outward from the city.
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Geologists are never at a loss for paperweights.
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