It is a curious feature of our existance that we come from a planet that is very good at promoting life but even better at extinguishing it.
("A Short History of Nearly Everything")
More Quotes from Bill Bryson:
For a long time it puzzled me how something so expensive, so leading edge, could be so useless, and then it occurred to me that a computer is a stupid machine with the ability to do incredibly smart things, while computer programmers are smart people with the ability to do incredibly stupid things. They are, in short, a perfect match.Bill Bryson
Our instinct may be to see the impossibility of tracking everything down as frustrating, dispiriting, perhaps even appalling, but it can just as well be viewed as almost unbearably exciting. We live on a planet that has a more or less infinite capacity to surprise. What reasoning person could possibly want it any other way?
Bill Bryson
I had always thought that once you grew up you could do anything you wanted - stay up all night or eat ice-cream straight out of the container.
Bill Bryson
I don't plan to write another science book, but I don't plan not to. I do enjoy writing histories, and taking subjects that are generally dull and trying to make them interesting.
Bill Bryson
Everyone has a supremely low moment somewhere along the AT, usually when the urge to quit the trail becomes almost overpowering. The irony of my moment was that I wanted to get back on the trail and didn't know how. I hadn't lost just Katz, my boon companion, but my whole sense of connectedness to the trail. I had lost my momentum, my feeling of purpose. In the most literal way I needed to find my feet again.
Bill Bryson
Incidentally, disturbance from cosmic background radiation is something we have all experienced. 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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Based on Keywords: existance, extinguishingNature and human life are as various as our several constitutions. Who shall say what prospect life offers to another?
Henry David Thoreau
From infancy on, we are all spies; the shame is not this but that the secrets to be discovered are so paltry and few.
John Updike
Fight the good fight of faith, and God will give you spiritual mercies.
George Whitefield