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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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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
Numbers
Efforts
Effort
Several
Existence
Total
Times
Lived
Eventual
Ever
Number
Cooperative
People
Whose
Cooperatives
Depends
Approximately
Thousand
Risen

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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 come from Des Moines. Someone had to.
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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.
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I can wear a baseball cap I am entitled to wear a baseball cap. I am genetically pre-disposed to wear a baseball cap, whereas most English people look wrong in a baseball cap.
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The universe is not only queerer than we suppose it is queerer than we can suppose
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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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... 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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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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Physicists are atoms' way of thinking about atoms.
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Everything seems to be designed for the benefit of the automobile and not the benefit of the human being.
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Still, I never really mind bad service in a restaurant. It makes me feel better about not leaving a tip.
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The great failure in education, much of the time, is the lack of excitement and stimulus
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Making English grammar conform to Latin rules is like asking people to play baseball using the rules of football.
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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 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.
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I could spend my life arriving each evening in a new city.
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It is always quietly thrilling to find yourself looking at a world you know well but have never seen from such an angle before.
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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.
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There is no reason why we shouldn't be able to split an infinitive, any more than we should forsake instant coffee and air travel because they weren't available to the Romans.
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