A Quote by Bill Bryson

Everything that has ever lived, plant or animal, dates its beginning from the same primordial twitch. At some point in an unimaginably distant past, some little bag of chemicals fidgeted to life. It absorbed some nutrients, gently pulsed, had a brief existence. This much may have happened many times before. But this ancestral packet did something additional and extraordinary. It cleaved itself and produced an heir. A tiny bundle of genetic material passed from one living entity to another, and has never stopped moving since. It was the moment of creation for us all.
In about 1975-76, I lived with a woman in a little hut with some fruit trees, and I had some of the most extraordinary, happy times of my life. Apart from the horrendous Queensland police, who were corrupt and venal, it really was like living in paradise.
Some people believe that we go on living in another body after death, that we lived before. They call it reincarnation. That we all lived before on the earth thousands of years ago or on some other planet. They say we have forgotten it. Some say they remember their past lives.
Unlike some people who have experienced the loss of an animal, I did not believe, even for a moment, that I would never get another. I did know full well that there were just too many animals out there in need of homes for me to take what I have always regarded as the self-indulgent road of saying the heartbreak of the loss of an animal was too much ever to want to go through with it again. To me, such an admission brought up the far more powerful admission that all the wonderful times you had with your animal were not worth the unhappiness at the end.
There might have been a hundred or a thousand life-bearing planets, had the course of evolution of the universe been a little different, or there might have been none at all. They would probably add, that, as life and man have been produced, that shows that their production was possible; and therefore, if not now then at some other time, if not here then in some other planet of some other sun, we should be sure to have come into existence; or if not precisely the same as we are, then something a little better or a little worse.
Did you ever look back at some moment in your past and have it suddenly grow so vivid that all the intervening years seemed brief, dreamlike, impersonal—the motions of a May afternoon surrendered to routine?
Maybe [artistry] doesn't have to be quite so full of anguish if you never happened to believe, in the first place, that the most extraordinary aspects of your being came from you. But maybe if you just believed that they were on loan to you from some unimaginable source for some exquisite portion of your life to be passed along when you're finished ... it starts to change everything.
I think when you leave a band in any situation that you are a part of.. I mean, when I was with It Bites I was a quarter of something, and when I was with Robert Plant I was a sixth of some- thing and when you leave you become the whole thing. So just after you spend time realizing what you are, and it just happened that I was doing that in my life as well as musically, it kind of happened at the same time. I was getting to a point in my life where I was beginning to realize who I am, and I like me.
If the point of life is the same as the point of a story, the point of life is character transformation. If I got any comfort as I set out on my first story, it was that in nearly every story, the protagonist is transformed. He's a jerk at the beginning and nice at the end, or a coward at the beginning and brave at the end. If the character doesn't change, the story hasn't happened yet. And if story is derived from real life, if story is just condensed version of life then life itself may be designed to change us so that we evolve from one kind of person to another.
There is too much at stake to worry about our own egos. When my son was killed, I had to face the fact that I was somehow also responsible for what happened. Every American that allows this to continue has, to some extent, blood on their hands. Some of us have a little bit, and some of us are soaked in it.
Most things are forgotten over time. Even the war itself, the life-and-death struggle people went through, is now like something from the distant past. We're so caught up in our everyday lives that events of the past, like ancient stars that have burned out, are no longer in orbit around our minds. There are just too many things we have to think about every day, too many new things we have to learn. New styles, new information, new technology, new terminology ... But still, no matter how much time passes, no matter what takes place in the interim, there are some things we can never assign to oblivion, memories we can never rub away. They remain with us forever, like a touchstone. And for me, what happened in the woods that day is one of these.
So each had a private little sun for her soul to bask in; some dream, some affection, some hobby, or at least some remote and distant hope.
something can only become an illusion after disillusionment. before that, it is something real. what caused the disillusionment? no one told me the print on the wall was just ink and paper and had no life of its own. at some point the cat stopped blinking, and i stopped thinking it could.
Looking to the material world for the satisfaction of our inner needs is the source of much fear. All fear is, in essence, fear of the future. We are afraid of things that have not yet happened, but which if they did might bring us pain, suffering, or some other discomfort - or stand in the way of some future contentment. And we are afraid that circumstances that are already causing us displeasure may continue in the future.
In what region of the earth ever so remote from us, in what corner of creation ever so far out of the range of our communication, does not some burden lightened, some bond loosened, some yoke lifted, some labor better remunerated, some new hope for despairing hearts, some new light or new liberty for the benighted or the oppressed, bear witness this day, and trace itself, directly or indirectly, back to the impulse given to the world by the successful establishment and operation of free institutions on this American continent?
Happiness is much more equally divided than some of us imagine. One man shall possess most of the materials, but little of the thing; another may possess much of the thing, but very few of the material. In this particular view of it, happiness had been beautifully compared to the man in the desert--he that gathered much had nothing over, and he that gathered little had no lack.
But you can’t put fight into a man’s guts if he hasn’t any fight in him. There are some of us so cowardly that you can’t ever make heroes of us, not even if you frighten us to death. We know too much, maybe. There are some of us who don’t live in the moment, who live a little ahead, or a little behind.
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