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I come from Des Moines. Someone had to.

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
Someone
Come
Moines

More quotes by Bill Bryson

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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.
Bill Bryson
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There are things you just can't do in life. You can't beat the phone company, you can't make a waiter see you until he's ready to see you, and you can't go home again.
Bill Bryson
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Have you ever seen Glenn Beck in operation? It is the most terrifying thing. It's so bad that you think he's going to announce in a minute that it's all a great con. He makes Sarah Palin look reasonable and steady.
Bill Bryson
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There are only three things that can kill a farmer: lightning, rolling over in a tractor, and old age.
Bill Bryson
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I love the feeling of being anonymous in a city I've never been before.
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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But what is life to a lichen ? Yet its impulse to exist, to be, is every bit as strong as ours arguably even stronger. If I were told that I had to spend decades being a furry growth on a rock in the woods, I believe I would lose the will to go on.
Bill Bryson
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I come Des Moines. Somebody had to.
Bill Bryson
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Houses aren't refuges from history. They are where history ends up.
Bill Bryson
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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.
Bill Bryson
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Physics is really nothing more than a search for ultimate simplicity, but so far all we have is a kind of elegant messiness.
Bill Bryson
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There is the odd exception, like Albert Einstein, but as a breed, scientists tend not be very good at presenting themselves.
Bill Bryson
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Even though sugar was very expensive, people consumed it till their teeth turned black, and if their teeth didn't turn black naturally, they blackened them artificially to show how wealthy and marvelously self-indulgent they were.
Bill Bryson
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I don't want to go and start trying to make jokes in places like India, Tanzania or Iraq. Afghanistan is not a funny place.
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.
Bill Bryson
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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.
Bill Bryson
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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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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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My first rule of consumerism is never to buy anything you can't make your children carry.
Bill Bryson
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I could spend my life arriving each evening in a new city.
Bill Bryson