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"Every atom you possess has almost certainly passed through several stars and been part of millions of organisms on its way to becoming you. We are each so atomically numberous and so vigorously recycled at death that a significant number of our atoms-up to a billion for each of us, it has been suggested-probably once belonged to Shakespeare. A billion more each came from Buddha and Genghis Khan and Beethoven, and any other historical figure you care to name."
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"The Bible warns [parents] against extremes in dealing with our adult children. It tells us to avoid trying to control [them] once they become adults. When children become independent, a major transition takes place: They are no longer under our authority."
"This heart within me I can feel, and I judge that it exists. This world I can touch, and I likewise judge that it exists. There ends all my knowledge, and the rest is construction. (...) Forever I shall be a stranger to myself."
"I am engaged in spiritual warfare every day. I must never let down my guard-I must keep armed."
"Who gave fire permission to burn?"
"But if I feel, may I never express? "Never! declared Reason.I groaned under her bitter sternness. Never - never - oh, hard word! This hag, this Reason, would not let me look up, or smile, or hope; she could not rest unless I were altogether crushed, cowed, broken-in, and broken down. According to her, I was born only to work for a piece of bread, to await the pains of death, and steadily through all life to despond. Reason might be right; yet no wonder we are glad at times to defy her, to rush from under her rod and give a truant hour to Imagination - her soft, bright foe, our sweet Help, our divine Hope."
"...because wherever else the future leads, it leads ultimately to death, the end that is present in my beginning and in yours."
"Why is it that the cross has become the symbol of Christianity? It is because at the cross Jesus purchased our redemptionand provided a righteousness which we could not ourselves earn."
"Do not become more useful than God."
"Those who expect to be both ignorant and free, expect what never was and never will be."
"Everything at some point has been declared the root of all evil."
Explore more quotes by Bill Bryson
"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."
"If the mattress stains were anything to go by, a previous user had not so much suffered from incontinence as rejoiced in it."
"The pleasant fact is that the British are not much good at violent crime except in fiction, which is of course as it should be."
"As the physicist Paul Davies puts it, 'If everything needs everything else, how did the communities of molecules ever arise in the first place?' It is rather as if all the ingredients in your kitchen somehow got together and baked themselves into a cake - but a cake that could moreover divide when necessary to produce more cakes. It is little wonder that we call it the miracle of life. It is also little wonder that we have barely begun to understand it."
"They talk about big skies in the western United States, and they may indeed have them, but you have never seen such lofty clouds, such towering anvils, as in Iowa in July."
"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."
"It's a bit burned, my mother would say apologetically at every meal, presenting you with a piece of meat that looked like something - a much-loved pet perhaps - salvaged from a tragic house fire. "But I think I scraped off most of the burned part, she would add, overlooking that this included every bit of it that had once been flesh. Happily, all this suited my father. His palate only responded to two tastes - burned and ice cream - so everything suited him so long as it was sufficiently dark and not too startlingly flavorful. Theirs truly was a marriage made in heaven, for no one could burn food like my mother or eat it like my dad."
"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."
"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."
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