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"By the time I had finished my coffee and returned to the streets, the rain had temporarily abated, but the streets were full of vast puddles where the drains where unable to cope with the volume of water. Correct me if I'm wrong, but you would think that if one nation ought by now to have mastered the science of drainage, Britain would be it."
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Exlpore more Observation quotes

"Quiet people always know more than they seem. Although very normal, their inner world is by default fronted mysterious and therefore assumed weird. Never underestimate the social awareness and sense of reality in a quiet person; they are some of the most observant, absorbent persons of all."

"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."

"The bowl is warmer than the soup."

"An idiot child screaming in a hospital. (on George Bernard Shaw)"

"Generally, there is a lot of truth value in stepping back, observing, then logically generalizing the extremes of what you see."

"While humans play God, dogs learn from their masters."

"His was an impenetrable darkness. I looked at him as you peer down at a man who is lying at the bottom of a precipice where the sun never shines."

"And only after he said it did he realize that among the countless suicides he could remember, this was the first with cyanide that had not been caused by the sufferings of love. Then something changed in the tone of his voice."And when you do find one, observe with care, he said to the intern:"they almost always have crystals in their heart."

"He began to realize that you cannot even fight happily with creatures that stand upon a different mental basis to yourself."
Explore more quotes by Bill Bryson

"There'd never been a more advantageous time to be a criminal in America than during the 13 years of Prohibition. At a stroke, the American government closed down the fifth largest industry in the United States - alcohol production - and just handed it to criminals - a pretty remarkable thing to do."

"Linguist say parties in the conversation will tolerate silence for four seconds before interjecting anything, however unrelated."

"It seems impossible that you could get something from nothing, but the fact that once there was nothing and now there is a universe is evident proof that you can."

"I ordered a coffee and a little something to eat and savored the warmth and dryness. Somewhere in the background Nat King Cole sang a perky tune. I watched the rain beat down on the road outside and told myself that one day this would be twenty years ago."

"Just because a word or expression has an antiquity or was once widely used does not confer on it some special immunity."

"Worse still, it isn't actually necessary to look to space for petrifying danger. As we are about to see, Earth can provide plenty of danger of its own."

"Nothing - really, absolutely nothing - says more about Victorian Britain and its capacity for brilliance than that the century's most daring and iconic building was entrusted to a gardener."

"It is not true that the English invented cricket as a way of making all other human endeavors look interesting and lively, that was merely an unintended side effect."

"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."
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