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

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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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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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I hadn't realized quite how extraordinary Charles Lindbergh's achievement was in flying the Atlantic alone. He had never flown over open water before, but he flew straight to Dingle Bay in Ireland and then on to Paris, exactly as planned.
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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 the countryside, litter doesn't have a friend. It doesn't have anybody who's saying, 'Wait a minute, this is really starting to get out of control.'
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Out of the thirty thousand types of edible plants thought to exist on Earth, just eleven—corn, rice, wheat, potatoes, cassava, sorghum, millet, beans, barley, rye, and oats—account for 93 percent of all that humans eat, and every one of them was first cultivated by our Neolithic ancestors.
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It's hard not to be kind of pessimistic about human beings generally, because we do tend to mess things up. If you just look at the history of extinctions, we've killed off an awful lot of animals - and I don't think we're doing a very good job of looking after the planet.
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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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... 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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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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My mother only ever said two things. She said,'I don't know, dear.'And she said,'Can I get you a sandwich, honey?
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What is it about maps? I could look at them all day, earnestly studying the names of towns and villages I have never heard of and will never visit.
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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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I'm quite certain that if the rest of the world vanished overnight and the development of cricket were left in Australian hands, within a generation, the players would be wearing shorts and using the bats to hit each other, and the thing is, it'd be a much better game for it.
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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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South Dakota... is like the world's first drive-through sensory deprivation chamber.
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All the things that are part of your heritage make you British - that makes this country what it is. It's part of your history. And here, unlike America, it's still living history.
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It was an odd situation. For a century and a half, men got rid of their own hair, which was perfectly comfortable, and instead covered their heads with something foreign and uncomfortable. Very often it was actually their own hair made into a wig. People who couldn't afford wigs tried to make their hair look like a wig.
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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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The English invented cricket to make other human endeavors look interesting.
Bill Bryson