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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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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
Sometimes
Really
Taxonomy
Battleground
Described
Science
Art

More quotes by Bill Bryson

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He had the sort of face that makes you realize God does have a sense of humor.
Bill Bryson
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Clearly, some time ago makers and consumers of American junk food passed jointly through some kind of sensibility barrier in the endless quest for new taste sensations. Now they are a little like those desperate junkies who have tried every known drug and are finally reduced to mainlining toilet bowl cleanser in an effort to get still higher.
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There are only three things that can kill a farmer: lightning, rolling over in a tractor, and old age.
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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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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.
Bill Bryson
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For anyone of a rational disposition, fashion is often nearly impossible to fathom. Throughout many periods of history – perhaps most – it can seem as if the whole impulse of fashion has been to look maximally ridiculous. If one could be maximally uncomfortable as well, the triumph was all the greater.
Bill Bryson
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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.
Bill Bryson
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The taipan is the one to watch out for. It is the most poisonous snake on Earth, with a lunge so swift and a venom so potent that your last mortal utterance is likely to be: I say, is that a sn--
Bill Bryson
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Physicists are atoms' way of thinking about atoms.
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If you believe in god, it's much more fantastic to believe that he created this universe billions of years ago and set in motion this long train of activities that eventually resulted in us. I think that's so much more satisfying, more thrilling, than the idea that it was all done in seven days.
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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Des Moines is like your typical American city it's just these concentric circles of malls, built outward from the city.
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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Cheapness is a great virtue.
Bill Bryson
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In terms of adaptability, humans are pretty amazingly useless.
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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The whole of the global economy is based on supplying the cravings of two per cent of the world's population.
Bill Bryson
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England was full of words I'd never heard before - streaky bacon, short back and sides, Belisha beacon, serviettes, high tea, ice-cream cornet.
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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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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