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1f63805
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When simple plants colonized the land and the first creatures crawled gasping from the sea, the Appalachians were there to greet them.
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Bill Bryson |
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03abc1c
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Illiteracy was the usual condition in sixteenth-century England, to be sure. According to one estimate at least 70 percent of men and 90 percent of women of the period couldn't even sign their names. But as one moved up the social scale, literacy rates rose appreciably.
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Bill Bryson |
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863bf64
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But even men far tougher and more attuned to the wilderness than Thoreau were sobered by its strange and palpable menace. Daniel Boone, who not only wrestled bears but tried to date their sisters, described corners of the southern Appalachians as "so wild and horrid that it is impossible to behold them without terror." When Daniel Boone is uneasy, you know it's time to watch your step."
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Bill Bryson |
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00bed56
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When at last a cab arrived and pulled up directly in front of me, I was astonished to discover that seventeen grown men and women believed they had a perfect right to try to get in ahead of me. A middle-aged man in a cashmere coat who was obviously wealthy and well-educated actually laid hands on me. I maintained possession by making a series of aggrieved Gallic honking noises--"Mais, non! Mais, non!"--and using my bulk to block the door. I..
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Bill Bryson |
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c90fc6c
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Romans park their cars the way I would park if I had just spilled a beaker of hydrochloric acid on my lap.
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Bill Bryson |
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17efcdd
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I wanted a little of that swagger that comes with being able to gaze at the horizon through eyes of chipped granite and say with a slow, manly sniff, 'Yeah, I've shit in the woods
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Bill Bryson |
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cd53dd1
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All over America today people would be dragging themselves to work, stuck in traffic jams, wreathed in exhaust smoke. I was going for a walk in the woods.
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Bill Bryson |
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2088582
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Faced with a wealth of text but a poverty of context, scholars have focused obsessively on what they can know. They have counted every word he wrote, logged every dib and jot. They can tell us (and have done so) that Shakespeare's works contain 138,198 commas, 26,794 colons, and 15,785 question marks; that ears are spoken of 401 times in his plays; that dunghill is used 10 times and dullard twice; that his characters refer to love 2,259 tim..
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Bill Bryson |
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f4a3e40
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Returning to my book, I learned that Sarah Palin thought Africa was a country. It was a wonderful evening.
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Bill Bryson |
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e59fa7b
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His real gift was as a phrasemaker. "Shakespeare's language," says Stanley Wells, "has a quality, difficult to define, of memorability that has caused many phrases to enter the common language." Among them: one fell swoop, vanish into thin air, bag and baggage, play fast and loose, go down the primrose path, be in a pickle, budge an inch, the milk of human kindness, more sinned against than sinning, remembrance of things past, beggar all de..
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Bill Bryson |
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7be534d
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The inhabitants of England in the age of Chaucer commonly used an expression, to be in hide and hair, meaning to be lost or beyond discovery. But then it disappears from the written record for four hundred years before resurfacing, suddenly and unexpectedly, in America in 1857 as neither hide nor hair. It is dearly unlikely that the phrase went into a linguistic coma for four centuries. So who was quietly preserving it for four hundred year..
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Bill Bryson |
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f27532d
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Facts are surprisingly delible things, and in four hundred years a lot of them simply fade away. One of the most popular plays of the age was Arden of Faversham, but no one now knows who wrote it. When an author's identity is known, that knowledge is often marvelously fortuitous.
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Bill Bryson |
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a6becc7
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History, Jared Diamond notes, is full of diseases that 'once caused terrifying epidemics and then disappeared as mysteriously as they had come38'. He cites the robust but mercifully transient English sweating sickness, which raged from 1485 to 1552, killing tens of thousands as it went, before burning itself out. Too much efficiency is not a good thing for any infectious organism.
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Bill Bryson |
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6dbe8b8
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Of every 200 atoms in your body, 126 are hydrogen, 51 are oxygen, and just 19 are carbon32.fn3
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Bill Bryson |
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00a177c
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Welcome. And congratulations. I am delighted that you could make it. Getting here wasn't easy, I know. In fact, I suspect it was a little tougher than you realize. To begin with, for you to be here now trillions of drifting atoms had somehow to assemble in an intricate and intriguingly obliging manner to create you. It's an arrangement so specialized and particular that it has never been tried before and will only exist this once. For the n..
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Bill Bryson |
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ec7f9ec
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The next time you spray on Chanel No. 5 (assuming you do), you may wish to reflect that you are dousing yourself in distillate of unseen sea monster.
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Bill Bryson |
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30c3043
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Walpole invented a term, gloomth, to convey the ambience of Gothick; Wyatt's houses were the very quintessence of gloomth.
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Bill Bryson |
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8fc8a4d
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There's something satisfying, I think," Evans said, "about the idea of light travelling for millions of years through space and just at the right moment as it reaches Earth someone looks at the right bit of sky and sees it."
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Bill Bryson |
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adff277
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I am not a religious soul, but I must say it does seem a little uncanny that on that morning of all mornings I should have looked over the bridge at such a propitious moment. I mentioned the story at lunch to one of the members of the cathedral, and he nodded sagely and pointed a finger heavenward, as if to say, 'It was God, of course.' I nodded and didn't say anything, but thought: 'Then why did He push him in?' Beyond
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Bill Bryson |
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1eb22e4
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Nobody deserves to go to the World Series more than the Chicago Cubs. But they can't go because that would spoil their custom of never going. It is an irreconcilable paradox.
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world-series
chicago-cubs
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Bill Bryson |
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2ae2b62
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The physicist Leo Szilard once announced to his friend Hans Bethe that he was thinking of keeping a diary: 'I don't intend to publish. I am merely going to record the facts for the information of God.' 'Don't you think God knows the facts?' Bethe asked. 'Yes,' said Szilard. 'He knows the facts, but He does not know this version of the facts.' Hans Christian von Baeyer, Taming the Atom
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Bill Bryson |
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17512e1
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Though you tell yourself it's preposterous, you can't quite shake the feeling that you are being watched. You order yourself to be serene (it's just a woods for goodness sake), but really you are jumpier than Don Knotts with pistol drawn.
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Bill Bryson |
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dc9c161
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For a long time it was assumed that anything so miraculously energetic as radioactivity must be beneficial. For years, manufacturers of toothpaste and laxatives put radioactive thorium in their products, and at least until the late 1920s the Glen Springs Hotel in the Finger Lakes region of New York (and doubtless others as well) featured with pride the therapeutic effects of its "Radioactive mineral springs." Radioactivity wasn't banned in ..
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Bill Bryson |
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8aecf33
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And yet in Britain, despite the constant buffetings of history, English survived. It is a cherishable irony that a language that succeeded almost by stealth, treated for centuries as the inadequate and second-rate tongue of peasants, should one day become the most important and successful language in the world.
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Bill Bryson |
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3a4affc
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If you could fly backwards into the past at the rate of one year per second, it would take you about half an hour to reach the time of Christ, and a little over three weeks to get back to the beginnings of human life. But it would take you twenty years to reach the dawn of the Cambrian period.
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Bill Bryson |
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462a04e
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Das Fazit aus alledem lautet: Wir leben in einem Universum, dessen Alter wir nicht berechnen konnen, umgeben von Sternen, deren Entfernung wir nicht kennen, zwischen Materie, die wir nicht identifizieren konnen, und alles funktioniert nach physikalischen Gesetzen, deren Eigenschaften wir eigentlich nicht verstehen.
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seite-223
universum
wissenschaft
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Bill Bryson |
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04805e7
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Not every visitor was enchanted. William Morris, the future designer and aesthete, then aged seventeen, was so appalled by what he saw as the exhibition's lack of taste and veneration of excess that he staggered from the building and was sick in the bushes.
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Bill Bryson |
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04e5789
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if you wish to end up as a moderately advanced, thinking society, you need to be at the right end of a very long chain of outcomes involving reasonable periods of stability interspersed with just the right amount of stress and challenge (ice ages appear to be especially helpful in this regard) and marked by a total absence of real cataclysm. As
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Bill Bryson |
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f21c437
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They can tell us not only what Shakespeare wrote but what he read. Geoffrey Bullough devoted a lifetime, nearly, to tracking down all possible sources for virtually everything mentioned in Shakespeare, producing eight volumes of devoted exposition revealing not only what Shakespeare knew but precisely how he knew it.
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Bill Bryson |
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834adbb
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The upshot of all this is that we live in a universe whose age we can't quite compute, surrounded by stars whose distances from us and each other we don't altogether know, filled with matter we can't identify, operating in conformance with physical laws whose properties we don't truly understand.
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Bill Bryson |
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bcb0e20
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In its first three minutes, according to inflation theory, the universe ran away with itself, doubling in size every one million million million million millionths of a second. Ninety-eight per cent of all that exists was created in those first 180 seconds.
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Bill Bryson |
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1b912c4
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For the universe to exist as it does requires that hydrogen be converted to helium in a precise but comparatively stately manner. Tweak the numbers even slightly and we would not be here. Optical
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Bill Bryson |
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fd4b60e
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I am so well prepared financially that I have money in a range of currencies that no longer exist. I
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Bill Bryson |
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0f8e624
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For anyone of a rational disposition, fashion is often nearly impossible to fathom. Throughout many periods of history--perhaps most--it can seem as if the whole impulse of fashion has been to look maximally ridiculous. If one could be maximally uncomfortable as well, the triumph was all the greater. Dressing
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Bill Bryson |
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a0d549f
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The process became known as sea-floor spreading. When the crust reached the end of its journey at the boundary with continents, it plunged back into the Earth in a process known as subduction.
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Bill Bryson |
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7b80bb3
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It was history's first co-operative international scientific venture, and almost everywhere it ran into problems. Many observers were waylaid by war, sickness or shipwreck. Others made their destinations but opened their crates to find equipment broken or warped by tropical heat. Once again the French seemed fated to provide the most memorably unlucky participants. Jean Chappe spent months travelling to Siberia by coach, boat and sleigh, nu..
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Bill Bryson |
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dcd1ba0
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Perhaps it would be an idea to require developers to live on their own estates for five years, as a demonstration of their superb liveability. It's just a thought. I
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Bill Bryson |
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f8c2c1c
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I just seem to have a knack for memorizing star fields,' he told me, with a frankly apologetic look, when I visited him and his wife, Elaine, in their picture-book bungalow on a tranquil edge of the village of Hazelbrook, out where Sydney finally ends and the boundless Australian bush begins. 'I'm not particularly good at other things,' he added. 'I don't remember names well.' 'Or where he's put things,' called Elaine from the kitchen.
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Bill Bryson |
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dac01a7
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If your pillow is six years old (apparently average age for a pillow) it has been estimated that one tenth of its weight will be made up of sloughed skin, living mites, dead mites and mite dung.
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Bill Bryson |
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43aade6
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tend to think in terms of words and not letters, so it is molecules they count, and these are numerous to say the least. At sea level, at a temperature of 0 degrees Celsius, one cubic centimetre of air (that is, a space about the size of a sugar cube) will contain 45 billion billion molecules. And they are in every single cubic centimetre you see around you. Think how many cubic centimetres there are in the world outside your window--how ma..
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Bill Bryson |
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44a4882
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His colleague Richard Feynman wanted to call these new basic particles partons16, as in Dolly, but was over-ruled. Instead they became known as quarks.
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Bill Bryson |
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5983eaa
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Thank you," I said and then abruptly leaned across the counter and with two forked fingers poked him sharply in the eyes. Actually, I didn't do that. I just imagined it. But imagining it made me feel better. I"
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Bill Bryson |
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bc02cdd
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Nearly every aspect of life was subject to some measure of legal restraint. At a local level, you could be fined for letting your ducks wander in the road, for misappropriating town gravel, for having a guest in your house without a permit from the local bailiff.
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Bill Bryson |
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c4e3e90
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here is a new rule: If you are too stupid to spell "disappointed" even approximately correctly, you are not allowed to take part in public discourse at any level. Trawling"
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Bill Bryson |