Bill Bryson Quotes
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I have made a career of bumbling around places, stumbling on landmarks and generally being quite haphazard and shambolic about the way I go about things.
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Cheapness is a great virtue.
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The best that can be said for Norwegian television is that it gives you the sensation of a coma without the worry and inconvenience.
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Open your refrigerator door, and you summon forth more light than the total amount enjoyed by most households in the 18th century. The world at night, for much of history, was a very dark place indeed.
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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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I'm a great believer that you had to do everything you've done to have got to where you are.
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I had to calm down because a state trooper pulled up alongside me at a traffic light and began looking at me with that sort of casual disdain you often get when you give a dangerously stupid person a gun and a squad car.
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We couldn't place their accents but we thought the smaller one might be Australian since he seemed so at home down under.
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I don't care how paranoid and irrational this makes me sound, but I know for a fact that the people of Paris want me dead.
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A sign in the yard of a church next door said CHRIST IS THE ANSWER. (The question, of course, is: What do you say when you strike your thumb with a hammer?)
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The world at night, for much of history, was a very dark place indeed.
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America was entering the age not just of the automobile but of the retarded attention span.
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...Our guide announces that he's going to take us to the coldest place on Earth, where particles are cooled to within a fraction of a Kelvin. 'Ah,' says Bryson. 'That must be Donald Rumsfeld's heart.'
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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.
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I grew up, really, in the days before air conditioning. So I can remember what it was like to be really hot, for instance, and I can remember what it was like when your barber shop and your local stores weren't air conditioned, so it was hot when you went in them and they propped the doors open.
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Bryson. You’ve got three kinds of chromosomes: X, Y and fuck-head. - Katz
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I understand cricket - what's going on, the scoring - but I can't understand why.
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For forty years or so this was the world headquarters of conspicuous consumption.
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Boston's freeway system is insane. It was clearly designed by a person who had spent his childhood crashing toy trains.
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The thing about the Army Corps of Engineers is that they don’t build things very well.
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I've been wanting to do a book about baseball for the longest time, and nobody will let me do it. It's the one thing from America I really miss.
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The first book I did - the first successful book - was a kind of a travel book, and publishers in Britain encouraged me to do more.
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I sometimes think I cannot write another passage about a disappointing meal ever again, because I've done it so many times.
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When you tell an Iowan a joke, you can see a kind of race going on between his brain and his expression.