Quote

I tell the kids that, even in a childhood marked by despair and deprivation, I knew that no matter what happened, I still had my family, or at least the remnants of a family ripped apart by divorce and then glued back together in various odd arrangements through a series of ill- advised remarriages. It was good to know I had a solid foundation.

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
Stills
Foundation
Odd
Remarriage
Together
Childhood
Solid
Glued
Still
Knew
Divorce
Remnants
Back
Least
Ill
Advised
Matter
Happened
Apart
Deprivation
Even
Family
Despair
Ripped
Good
Tell
Various
Marked
Kids
Series
Arrangements

More quotes by Bill Bryson

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I often feel I'm a disappointment to people because they expect me to be the guy in the books. When I sit next to someone at a dinner party I can see they expect me to be quick and witty, and I'm not at all.
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The English invented cricket to make other human endeavors look interesting.
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Houses aren't refuges from history. They are where history ends up.
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The great failure in education, much of the time, is the lack of excitement and stimulus
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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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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.
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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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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.
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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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Eating in Sweden is really just a series of heartbreaks.
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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
Bill Bryson
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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.
Bill Bryson
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South Dakota... is like the world's first drive-through sensory deprivation chamber.
Bill Bryson
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My first rule of consumerism is never to buy anything you can't make your children carry.
Bill Bryson
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As the saying goes, it takes all kinds to make the world go around, though perhaps some shouldn't go quite so far around it as others.
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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As a rule of thumb, I would submit that if you need to call your floss provider, for any reason, you are probably not ready for this level of oral hygiene.
Bill Bryson
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My mother only ever said two things. She said,'I don't know, dear.'And she said,'Can I get you a sandwich, honey?
Bill Bryson
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It is not as if farming brought a great improvement in living standards either. A typical hunter-gatherer enjoyed a more varied diet and consumed more protein and calories than settled people, and took in five times as much viatmin C as the average person today.
Bill Bryson
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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.
Bill Bryson