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"The hard and unexpected part is the realization not just that my son is not here but that the boy he was is gone forever. I would give anything to have them both back. But of course that cannot be. Life moves on. Kids grow up and move away, and if you don't know this already, believe me, it happens faster than you can imagine."
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"Being a parent wasn't just about bearing a child. It was about bearing witness to its life."

"Disciplining a child is easier than disciplining a grown person, and forgiving a child's insolence is easier than forgiving a grown person's impudence."

"Don't box your children in and tell them that everything is a sin. You'll produce either rebels, or very boring people."

"Effective parenting requires being the grown up version of what you want your children to be. Why? Because example is the most compelling superpower."

"Your love life is insignificant when it comes to raising your children to be respectable human beings. The moment you see them suffer or lower their standards because of your selfishness, is the day you should realize that nothing matters more than them. You are not just the queen or king of your fairy tale. The real story of your life is the gift of time God gave you with them."

"Passing their toilet training is the very last thing that some adults did that has made their parents proud of them."

"Mothers should be very careful what type of boys and men they create, or allow to be created."
Explore more quotes by Bill Bryson

"In the mystifying world that was Victorian parenthood, obedience took precedence over all considerations of affection and happiness, and that odd, painful conviction remained the case in most well-heeled homes up until at least the time of the First World War."

"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."

"She was torn between her customer service training and her youthful certitude."

"Roads get wider and busier and less friendly to pedestrians. And all of the development based around cars, like big sprawling shopping malls. Everything seems to be designed for the benefit of the automobile and not the benefit of the human being."

"There are three stages in scientific discovery. First, people deny that it is true, then they deny that it is important; finally they credit the wrong person."

"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."

"And there was never a better time to delve for pleasure in language than the sixteenth century, when novelty blew through English like a spring breeze. Some twelve thousand words, a phenomenal number, entered the language between 1500 and 1650, about half of them still in use today, and old words were employed in ways not tried before. Nouns became verbs and adverbs; adverbs became adjectives. Expressions that could not have grammatically existed before - such as 'breathing one's last' and 'backing a horse', both coined by Shakespeare - were suddenly popping up everywhere."

"If you drive to, say, Shenandoah National Park, or the Great Smoky Mountains, you'll get some appreciation for the scale and beauty of the outdoors. When you walk into it, then you see it in a completely different way. You discover it in a much slower, more majestic sort of way."
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