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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

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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
Never
Concepts
Spanish
Think
Car
Motor
Thinking
Eating
Midnight
Humor
Sarcastic
Fun
Concept
Inspirational
Invention
Italians
Ever
Ridiculous
Swiss
Nothing
Dinner
Germans

More quotes by Bill Bryson

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I have a small tattered clipping that I sometimes carry with meand pull out for purposes of privateamusement. It's a weather forecast from theWestern Daily Mail and it says, in toto: 'Outlook: Dry and warm, but cooler with some rain.
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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.
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He had the sort of face that makes you realize God does have a sense of humor.
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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.
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Croissant: However you choose to pronounce it at home, it is perhaps worth nothing that outside the United States, the closer you can come to saying kwass-ohn, the sooner you can expect to be presented with one.
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Taking a scenic route in Southeast Iowa is like talking about a good Barry Manilow album. You have to make certain allowances.
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Science has been quite embattled. It's the most important thing there is. An arts graduate is not going to fix global warming. They may do other valuable things, but they are not going to fix the planet or cure cancer or get rid of malaria.
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Life just wants to be but it doesn't want to be much.
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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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Consider the Lichen. Lichens are just about the hardiest visible organisms on Earth, but the least ambitious.
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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.
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Energy is liberated matter, matter is energy waiting to happen.
Bill Bryson
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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.
Bill Bryson
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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.
Bill Bryson
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I turned to my own bunk and examined it with a kind of appalled fascination. If the mattress stains were anything to go by, a previous user had not so much suffered from incontinence as rejoiced in it. He had evidently included the pillow in his celebrations.
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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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There are only three things that can kill a farmer: lightning, rolling over in a tractor, and old age.
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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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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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I see litter as part of a long continuum of anti-social behaviour.
Bill Bryson