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4478498
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The prize item of the house is Jane's small round writing table, where all her books were scratched out. A group of Japanese visitors were gathered around it now, discussing it in low, reverential whispers, which is something I find the Japanese do exceptionally well. Nobody gets more out of a few low grunts and a couple of rounded vowel sounds stretched out and spoken as if in surprise or consternation. They can carry on the most complex c..
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Bill Bryson |
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055340b
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Where the weather is concerned, the Midwest has the worst of both worlds. In the winter the wind is razor sharp. It skims down from the Arctic and slices through you. It howls and swirls and buffets the house. It brings piles of snow and bonecracking cold. From November to March you walk leaning forward at a twenty-degree angle, even indoors, and spend your life waiting for your car to warm up, or digging it out of drifts or scraping futile..
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Bill Bryson |
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902f0b9
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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. At
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Bill Bryson |
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87d7f0f
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Everything on offer was robustly Scottish and not in the least appealing to someone from Iowa. (I believe I can speak for my entire state on this.) The dinner options featured a plate of haggis, neeps and tatties, and the snacks included Tunnock's teacake, haggis-flavored potato chips, and Mrs. Tilly's Scottish Tablet, which sounded to me not at all like a food but more like something you would put in a tub of warm water and immerse sore fe..
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Bill Bryson |
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0ab3e23
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Louis Agassiz, the Swiss naturalist who became the most outspoken advocate of the idea that much of Earth had once been covered in ice, but alienated many in the process.
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Bill Bryson |
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5732640
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Without his books, Thomas Jefferson could not have been Thomas Jefferson. For someone like him living on a frontier, remote from actual experience, books were vital guides to how life might be lived, and none gave him greater inspiration, satisfaction,
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Bill Bryson |
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2c4f109
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I also said no to a first-aid kit, sewing kit, anti-snake-bite kit, $12 emergency whistle, and small orange plastic shovel for burying one's poop, on the grounds that these were unnecessary, too expensive, or invited ridicule.
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Bill Bryson |
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f0110b0
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radiocarbon dating works only for objects up to forty thousand or so years old. Curiously,
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Bill Bryson |
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b9161df
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James Croll, the Scottish janitor and self-taught polymath whose theories concerning Earth's orbit provided the first plausible explanation for how ice ages might have started.
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Bill Bryson |
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514f273
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Indeed, if not told to live -- if not given some kind of active instruction from another cell -- cells automatically kill themselves. Cells need a lot of reassurance.
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Bill Bryson |
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634cb22
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It is often noted, for instance, that Shakespeare's plays are full of ocean metaphors ("take arms against a sea of troubles," "an ocean of salt tears," "wild sea of my conscience") and that every one of his plays has at least one reference to the sea in it somewhere."
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Bill Bryson |
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a136827
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The 1905 draft of a treaty between Russia and Japan, written in both French and English, treated the English control and French controler as synonyms when in fact the English form means "to dominate or hold power" while the French means simply "to inspect." The treaty nearly fell apart as a result. The"
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Bill Bryson |
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931b7f5
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In nearly every year for at least 250 years, deaths outnumbered births in London.
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Bill Bryson |
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I somberly reflected that the history of the Highlands is five hundred years of cruelty and bloodshed followed by two hundred years of way too much bagpipe music.
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Bill Bryson |
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c80f58c
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They are taking away all the nice things there because they are impractical, as if that were reason enough - the red phone-boxes, the pound note, those open London buses that you can leap on and off. There is almost no experience in life that makes you look and feel more suave than jumping on or off a moving London bus. But they aren't practical. They require two men (one to drive and one to stop thugs from kicking the crap out of the Pakis..
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Bill Bryson |
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7924d00
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These are all just informed guesses.
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Bill Bryson |
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4560e35
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Put in the crudest terms, Australia was slightly more important to us in 1997 than bananas, but not nearly as important as ice cream.
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Bill Bryson |
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336bbac
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Why is it, I wondered, that old people are always so self-centered and excitable? But I just smiled benignly and stood back, comforted by the thought that soon they would be dead. I
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Bill Bryson |
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eae85a7
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If you want to say that a word has a circumflex on its penultimate syllable, without saying flat out that it has a circumflex there, there is a word for it: properispomenon.
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Bill Bryson |
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c2f60f6
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By the time the first Europeans arrived in the New World, farmers there were harvesting more than a hundred kinds of edible plants--potatoes, tomatoes, sunflowers, eggplants, avocados, sweet potatoes, peanuts, cashews, pineapples, papaya, guava, yams, manioc (or cassava), pumpkins, vanilla, a whole slew of beans and squashes, four types of chili peppers, and chocolate, among rather a lot else--not a bad haul. It has been estimated that 60 p..
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Bill Bryson |
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3ec9f1f
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Never has anyone milked a single thought more vigorously and successfully than he did. The line for which he is remembered was "Work expands to fill the time available for its completion," still known as Parkinson's Law. It was first elucidated in a comic essay he wrote for The Economist in 1955 while he was a professor at the University of Malaya in Singapore." --
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Bill Bryson |
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0bd35f9
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It is not as if farming brought a great improvement in living standards either. A typical hunter-gatherer enjoyed a more varied diet and consumed more protein and calories than settled people, and took in five times as much vitamin C as the average person today. Even in the bitterest depths of the ice ages, we now know, nomadic people ate surprisingly well--and surprisingly healthily. Settled people, by contrast, became reliant on a much sm..
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Bill Bryson |
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891bbcc
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By the late eighteenth century Britain's statute books were plump with capital offences; you could be hanged for any of 200 acts, including, notably, 'impersonating an Egyptian'.
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Bill Bryson |
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6aebfb9
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From Ukraine, it wasn't uncommon for hang gliders to take off near the border and float their way into Hungary or Romania. Once they hovered in the general vicinity of the drop spot, they'd release their cargo--hundreds, even thousands of cartons of cigarettes--make a hasty turn, and head back.
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Bill Bryson |
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8236dad
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Jennings quotes the response of a contestant in the Miss Teen USA competition when asked to explain why so many Americans couldn't even find their own country on a map. With solemnity and conviction she responded: I personally believe that U.S. Americans are unable to do so because some people out there in our nation don't have maps, and I believe that our education like such as in South Africa and, uh, the Iraq, everywhere like such as, an..
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Bill Bryson |
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8142bf8
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Part of the power of travel is that you stand a good chance of being hollowed out by it. The lucky come back home complaining about crooked rug merchants and dishonest taxi drivers; the unlucky never come home at all.
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Bill Bryson |
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When they aren't being incompetent, city officials like to relax with a little corruption.
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Bill Bryson |
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Yugoslavian hotel: "The flattening of underwear with pleasure is the job of the chambermaid. Turn to her straightaway."
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Bill Bryson |
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The universe is an amazingly fickle and eventful place, and our existence within is a wonder.
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universe
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Bill Bryson |
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cb34963
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In ways that we have barely begun to understand, trillions upon trillions of reflexive chemical reactions add up to a mobile, thinking, decision-making you--or, come to that, a rather less reflective but still incredibly organized dung beetle. Every living thing, never forget, is a wonder of atomic engineering.
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Bill Bryson |
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ba41d65
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Now here's a thought to consider. Every twenty minutes on the Appalachian Trail, Katz and I walked farther than the average American walks in a week. For 93 percent of all trips outside the home, for whatever distance or whatever purpose, Americans now get in a car. On average the total walking of an American these days--that's walking of all types: from car to office, from office to car, around the supermarket and shopping malls--adds up t..
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Bill Bryson |
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302b77d
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In just 200 million years, possibly less, the Earth was essentially formed, though still molten and subject to constant bombardment from all the debris that remained floating about. At
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Bill Bryson |
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Americans alive today each have about 625 times more lead in their blood than people did a century ago.
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Bill Bryson |
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lunar material, it is thought, came from the Earth's crust, not its core, which is why the Moon has so little iron while we have a lot.
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Bill Bryson |
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Medieval banquets show people eating all kinds of foods that are no longer eaten. Birds especially featured. Eagles, herons, peacocks, sparrows, larks, finches, swans, and almost all other feathered creatures were widely consumed. This wasn't so much because swans and other birds were fantastically delicious--they weren't; that's why we don't eat them now--but rather because other, better meats weren't available.
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Bill Bryson |
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It is mildly disconcerting to reflect that the whole of meaningful human history--the development of farming, the creation of towns, the rise of mathematics and writing and science and all the rest--has taken place within an atypical patch of fair weather.
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Bill Bryson |
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The Pacific is about a foot and a half higher along its western edge--a consequence of the centrifugal force created by the Earth's spin. Just as when you pull on a tub of water the water tends to flow toward the other end, as if reluctant to come with you, so the eastward spin of Earth piles water up against the ocean's western margins.
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Bill Bryson |
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The animals we raise for food today are eaten not because they are notably delectable or nutritious or a pleasure to be around, but because they were the ones first domesticated in the Stone Age.
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Bill Bryson |
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pharmaceutical industry hasn't given us an entirely new antibiotic since the 1970s. Our
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Bill Bryson |
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It's hard for people now to remember just how enormous the world was back then for everybody, and how far away even fairly nearby places were. When we called my grandparents long distance on the telephone in Winfield, something we hardly ever did, it sounded as if they were speaking to us from a distant star. We had to shout to be heard and plug a finger in an ear to catch their faint, tinny voices in return. They were only about a hundred ..
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Bill Bryson |
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Only twenty-six British universities have total endowments greater than the amount given annually to the Ohio State University football team. I
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Bill Bryson |
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There is actually a certain value in not finding anything,' he said. 'It helps cosmologists to work out the rate at which galaxies are evolving. It's one of those rare areas where the absence of evidence is evidence.
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Bill Bryson |
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Tune your television to any channel it doesn't receive, and about 1 percent of the dancing static you see is accounted for by this ancient remnant of the Big Bang. The next time you complain that there is nothing on, remember that you can always watch the birth of the universe.
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Bill Bryson |
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Ironing was another massive and dauntingly separate task. Irons cooled quickly, so a hot iron had to be used with speed and then exchanged with a freshly heated one. Generally, there would be one on the go and two being heated. The irons, heavy in themselves, had to be pressed down with great force to get the desired results. But because there were no controls, they had to be wielded with delicacy and care so as not to scorch fabrics. Heati..
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Bill Bryson |