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" In 1927, if you were stuck with idle time, reading is what you did. It's no accident that the 'Book-of-the-Month Club' and 'The Literary Guild' were founded in that period as well as a lot of magazines, like 'Reader's Digest,' 'Time,' and 'The New Yorker.' "

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" 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. "

Bill Bryson

Development

Human

Roads

" My first rule of consumerism is never to buy anything you can't make your children carry. "

" If you go out on the Appalachian Trail, you have to bring so much more equipment - a tent, sleeping bag - but if you go hiking in England, or Europe, generally, towns and villages are near enough together at the end of the day you can always go to a nice little inn and have a hot bath and something to drink. "

" You don't need a science degree to understand about science. You just need to think about it. "

" I don't know whether I'm misanthropic. It seems to me I'm constantly disappointed. I'm very easily disappointed. Disappointed in the things that people do; disappointed in the things that people construct. I want things to be better all the time. "

Bill Bryson

Better

People

" 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 is unthinkable to have a British countryside that doesn't have actual functioning farmers riding tractors, cows in fields, things like that. "

Bill Bryson

Things

Farmers

" I grew up in Des Moines. My dad had a house full of books, things like P.G. Wodehouse books and 'Wuthering Heights' by Emily Bronte. "

Bill Bryson

Things

Heights

" I'm definitely an American, because I grew up here. But I've lived very happily in Britain. "

" I still enjoy traveling a lot. I mean, it amazes me that I still get excited in hotel rooms just to see what kind of shampoo they've left me. "

" 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. "

" I understand cricket - what's going on, the scoring - but I can't understand why. "

" I see litter as part of a long continuum of anti-social behaviour. "

" 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. "

" There are only three things that can kill a farmer: lightning, rolling over in a tractor, and old age. "

" I can't fix the world. If you want to make a difference in life, you have to direct your energies in a focused way. "

" I have long known that it is part of God's plan for me to spend a little time with each of the most stupid people on earth. "

Bill Bryson

Time

People

" An awful lot of England is slowly eroding, in ways that I find really distressing, and an awful lot of it is the hedgerows... We're reaching the point where a lot of the English countryside looks just like Iowa - just kind of open space. "

" 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. "

" There are things you just can't do in life. You can't beat the phone company, you can't make a waiter see you until he's ready to see you, and you can't go home again. "

" America is a great disappointment to me. As I said in one of my books, other societies create civilisations; we build shopping malls. "

" In the countryside, litter doesn't have a friend. It doesn't have anybody who's saying, 'Wait a minute, this is really starting to get out of control.' "

" You don't have to know anything about baseball to respond to Babe Ruth because he's just this magnificent human being. And a really good story because he was this kid who grew up essentially as an orphan, you know, had a tough life, and then he became the most successful baseball player ever. But he was also a really good guy. "

" We forget just how painfully dim the world was before electricity. A candle, a good candle, provides barely a hundredth of the illumination of a single 100 watt light bulb. "