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"When the poet Paul Valery once asked Albert Einstein if he kept a notebook to record his ideas, Einstein looked at him with mild but genuine surprise. "Oh, that's not necessary," he replied . "It's so seldom I have one."
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"She's Prim's size in diameter."
"Down there between our legs, it's like an entertainment complex in the middle of a sewage system. Who designed that?"
"The Republic's most wanted criminal is just a boy, sitting before me, suddenly vulnerable, laying all his weaknesses out for me to see."
"An idiot child screaming in a hospital. (on George Bernard Shaw)"
"Novelists should never allow themselves to weary of the study of real life. If they observed this duty conscientiously, they would give us fewer pictures chequered with vivid contrasts of light and shade; they would seldom elevate their heroes and heroines to the heights of rapture - still seldomer sink them to the depths of despair; for if we rarely taste the fulness of joy in this life, we yet more rarely savour the acrid bitterness of hopeless anguish."
"Boys are marvellous creatures. Perhaps they will sink below the brutes, perhaps they will attain to a woman's tenderness."
"She was the most wonderful woman for prowling about the house. How she got from one story to another was a mystery beyond solution. A lady so decorous in herself, and so highly connected, was not to be suspected of dropping over the banisters or sliding down them, yet her extraordinary facility of locomotion suggested the wild idea."
"If he's not he should be by now. The things that happen to people we never really know. What happens in houses behind closed doors, what secrets."
"Vivi muito tempo no mundo das pessoas grandes. Vi-as de bem perto. Não fiquei com muito melhor opinião delas."
Explore more quotes by Bill Bryson
"Hunters will tell you that a moose is a wily and ferocious forest creature. Nonsense. A moose is a cow drawn by a three-year-old."
"Disassemble the cells of a sponge (by passing them through a sieve, for instance), then dump them into a solution, and they will find their way back together and build themselves into a sponge again. You can do this to them over and over, and they will doggedly reassemble because, like you and me and every other living thing, they have one overwhelming impulse: to continue to be."
"The thing about Ayers Rock is that by the time you finally get there you are already a little sick of it."
"If the mattress stains were anything to go by, a previous user had not so much suffered from incontinence as rejoiced in it."
"If we should be worrying about anything to do with the future of English, it should not be that the various strands will drift apart but that they will grow indistinguishable. And what a sad, sad loss that would be."
"In France, a chemist named Pilatre de Rozier tested the flammability of hydrogen by gulping a mouthful and blowing across an open flame, proving at a stroke that hydrogen is indeed explosively combustible and that eyebrows are not necessarily a permanent feature of one's face."
"On a cooler sun on a primordial earth: "I later learned that biologists, when they are feeling jocose, refer to this as the 'Chinese Resaturant Problem'--because we has a dim sun."
"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."
"It may not look it, but all the glass on Earth is flowing downwards under the relentless drag of gravity. Remove a pane of really old glass from the window of a European cathedral and it will be noticeably thicker at the bottom than at the top."
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