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"I love to watch cities wake up, and Paris wakes up more abruptly, more startlingly, than any place I know."
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"I remember a tour where we played 50 cities in 56 days. We also went to Europe a couple of times."
"Probably for every man there is at least one city that sooner or later turns into a girl. How well or how badly the man actually knew the girl doesn't necessarily affect the transformation. She was there, and she was the whole city, and that's that."
"I love to watch cities wake up, and Paris wakes up more abruptly, more startlingly, than any place I know."
"Our fifty principal cities contain 39.3 per cent of our entire German population, and 45.8 per cent of the Irish. Our ten larger cities only nine per cent of the entire population, but 23 per cent of the foreign."
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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