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00e62e7
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it occurred to me that never again would he be seven years, one month and six days old, so we had better catch these moments while we can.
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Bill Bryson |
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22607a4
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Everywhere throughout New England you find old, tumbledown field walls, often in the middle of the deepest, most settled- looking woods- a reminder of just how swiftly nature reclaims the land in America.
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Bill Bryson |
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2f6476d
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Incidentally, disturbance from cosmic background radiation is something we have all experienced. 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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0c5cdbf
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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.
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humor
old-people
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Bill Bryson |
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348ce47
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In terms of adaptability, humans are pretty amazingly useless.
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science
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Bill Bryson |
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6c89548
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Bulgaria, I reflected as I walked back to the hotel, isn't a country; it's a near-death experience.
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travel
death
1990s
city-centre
european
night-club
post-communist
sofia
bulgaria
country
nightlife
adventure
eastern-europe
crisis
europeans
europe
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Bill Bryson |
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e06daba
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And before long there will be no more milk in bottles delivered to the doorstep or sleepy rural pubs, and the countryside will be mostly shopping centers and theme parks. Forgive me. I don't mean to get upset. But you are taking my world away from me, piece by little piece, and sometimes it just pisses me off. Sorry.
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Bill Bryson |
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e52578a
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Human beings would split the atom and invent television, nylon, and instant coffee before they could figure out the age of their own planet.
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Bill Bryson |
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e7cc888
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When you consider it from a human perspective, and clearly it would be difficult for us to do otherwise, life is an odd thing. It couldn't wait to get going, but then, having gotten going, it seemed in very little hurry to move on.
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life
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Bill Bryson |
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6bc9407
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I don't wish to denigrate a sport that is enjoyed by millions, some of them awake and facing the right way, but it is an odd game. It is the only sport that incorporates meal breaks. It is the only sport that shares its name with an insect. It is the only sport in which spectators burn as many calories as players - more if they are moderately restless. It is the only competitive activity of any type, other than perhaps baking, in which you ..
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Bill Bryson |
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9d2f6b1
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In the morning I awoke early and experienced that sinking sensation that overcomes you when you first open your eyes and realize that instead of a normal day ahead of you, with its scatterings of simple gratifications, you are going to have a day without even the tiniest of pleasures; you are going to drive across Ohio.
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Bill Bryson |
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106543c
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It seems impossible that you could get something from nothing, but the fact that once there was nothing and now there is a universe is evident proof that you can.
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universe
inspirational
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Bill Bryson |
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cd965f8
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These Cro-Magnon people were identical to us: they had the same physique, the same brain, the same looks. And, unlike all previous hominids who roamed the earth, they could choke on food. That may seem a trifling point, but the slight evolutionary change that pushed man's larynx deeper into his throat, and thus made choking a possibility, also brought with it the possibility of sophisticated, well articulated speech. Other mammals have no ..
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bill-bryson
cro-magnon
mammals
mother-tongue
language
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Bill Bryson |
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837a274
|
One of the hardest ideas for humans to accept,' he says, 'is that we are not the culmination of anything. There is nothing inevitable about our being here. It is part of our vanity as humans that we tend to think of evolution as a process that, in effect, was programmed to produce us.
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Bill Bryson |
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567a177
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In the morning a new man was behind the front desk. "And how did you enjoy your stay, Sir?" he asked smoothly. "It was singularly execrable," I replied. "Oh, excellent," he purred, taking my card "In fact, I would go so far as to say that the principal value of a stay in this establishment is that it is bound to make all subsequent service-related experiences seem, in comparison, refreshing." He made a deeply appreciative expression as if t..
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Bill Bryson |
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db7bcf3
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I hung up again and looked at Katz. "What is it with this town? I've blown more intelligent life into a handkerchief."
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Bill Bryson |
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fe69fe0
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Bipedalism is a demanding and risky strategy. It means refashioning the pelvis into a full load-bearing instrument. To preserve the required strength, the birth canal in the female must be comparatively narrow. This has two very significant immediate consequences and one longer-term one. First, it means a lot of pain for any birthing mother and greatly increased danger of fatality to mother and baby both. Moreover, to get the baby's head th..
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Bill Bryson |
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6197359
|
In my day the principal concerns of university students were sex, smoking dope, rioting and learning. Learning was something you did only when the first three weren't available.
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learning
students
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Bill Bryson |
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15daac3
|
Even though sugar was very expensive, people consumed it till their teeth turned black, and if their teeth didn't turn black naturally, they blackened them artificially to show how wealthy and marvelously self-indulgent they were.
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history
sweet-tooth
why-tanning-is-stupid
fads
sugar
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Bill Bryson |
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bec1fd0
|
In this he was like most Midwesterners. Directions are very important to them. They have an innate need to be oriented, even in their anecdotes. Any story related by a Midwesterner will wander off at some point into a thicket of interior monologue along the lines of "We were staying at a hotel that was eight blocks northeast of the state capital building. Come to think of it, it was northwest. And I think it was probably more like nine bloc..
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midwesterners
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Bill Bryson |
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c111029
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It is always quietly thrilling to find yourself looking at a world you know well but have never seen from such an angle before.
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renewal
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Bill Bryson |
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f145098
|
On the morning of our second day, we were strolling down the Champs-Elysees when a bird shit on his head. 'Did you know a bird's shit on your head?' I asked a block or two later. Instinctively Katz put a hand to his head, looked at it in horror - he was always something of a sissy where excrement was concerned; I once saw him running through Greenwood Park in Des Moines like the figure in Edvard Munch's 'The Scream' just because he had inad..
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Bill Bryson |
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ef44faa
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Australia is mostly empty and a long way away. Its population is small and its role in the world consequently peripheral. It doesn't have coups, recklessly overfish, arm disagreeable despots, grow coca in provocative quantities, or throw its weight around in a brash and unseemly manner. It is stable and peaceful and good. It doesn't need watching, and so we don't. But I will tell you this: the loss is entirely ours.
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Bill Bryson |
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7060ce1
|
Cavendish is a book in himself. Born into a life of sumptuous privilege- his grandfathers were dukes, respectively, of Devonshire and Kent- he was the most gifted English scientist of his age, but also the strangest. He suffered, in the words of one of his few biographers, from shyness to a "degree bordering on disease." Any human contact was for him a source of the deepest discomfort. Once he opened his door to find an Austrian admirer, f..
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shy
shyness
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Bill Bryson |
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8d29ca2
|
To my surprise, I felt a certain springy keenness. I was ready to hike. I had waited months for this day, after all, even if it had been mostly with foreboding. I wanted to see what was out there. 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. I was more than ready for this.
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Bill Bryson |
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c334a1d
|
if you were designing an organism to look after life in our lonely cosmos, to monitor where it is going and keep a record of where it has been, you wouldn't choose human beings for the job. But here's an extrememly salient point: we have been chosen, by fate or Providence or whatever you wish to call it. As far as we can tell, we are the best there is. We may be all there is. It's an unnerving thought that we may be the living universe's s..
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Bill Bryson |
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801bcc6
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Strange as it may seem, wrote Richard Feynman, we understand the distribution of matter in the interior of the Sun far better than we understand the interior of the Earth.
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Bill Bryson |
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8d62e6d
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Out of the thirty thousand types of edible plants thought to exist on Earth, just eleven--corn, rice, wheat, potatoes, cassava, sorghum, millet, beans, barley, rye, and oats--account for 93 percent of all that humans eat, and every one of them was first cultivated by our Neolithic ancestors.
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Bill Bryson |
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f0d87c8
|
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. It just seems right that an event of that magnitude should be witnessed.
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Bill Bryson |
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79bfcd4
|
Before, prior to. There is no difference between these two except length and a certain affectedness on the part of 'prior to.' To paraphrase Bernstein, if you would use 'posterior to' instead of 'after,' then by all means use 'prior to' instead of 'before.
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Bill Bryson |
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17975ae
|
A significant fraction of thru-hikers reach Katahdin, then turn around and start back to Georgia. They just can't stop walking, which kind of makes you wonder.
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hiking
walking
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Bill Bryson |
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1762304
|
Look at a globe and what you are seeing really is a snapshot of the continents as they have been for just one-tenth of 1 per cent of the earths history.
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Bill Bryson |
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d5a8a28
|
It was an especially wonderful time to be a noisy moron.
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Bill Bryson |
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5e63b28
|
Finally, this being America, there is the constant possibility of murder.
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funny
muder
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Bill Bryson |
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2531a13
|
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."
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Bill Bryson |
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c1eb2c9
|
Equally arresting are British pub names. Other people are content to dub their drinking establishment with pedestrian names like Harry's Bar and the Greenwood Lounge. But a Briton, when he wants to sup ale, must find his way to the Dog and Duck, the Goose and Firkin, the Flying Spoon, or the Spotted Dog. The names of Britain's 70,000 or so pubs cover a broad range, running from the inspired to the improbable, from the deft to the daft. Almo..
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Bill Bryson |
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5046657
|
So, if people didn't settle down to take up farming, why then did they embark on this entirely new way of living? We have no idea - or actually, we have lots of ideas, but we don't know if any of them are right. According to Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, at least thirty-eight theories have been put forward to explain why people took to living in communities: that they were driven to it by climatic change, or by a wish to stay near their dead, o..
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humor
life
sedentary
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Bill Bryson |
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c10c87d
|
So here I am, my affections torn between a postal service that never feeds me but can tackle a challenge and one that gives me free tape and prompt service but won't help me out when I can't remember a street name. The lesson to draw from this, of course, is that when you move from one country to another you have to accept that there are some things that are better and some things worse, and there is nothing you can do about it. That may no..
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Bill Bryson |
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40e79fb
|
When I awoke it was daylight. The inside of my tent was coated in a curious flaky rime, which I realized after a moment was all of my nighttime snores, condensed and frozen and pasted to the fabric, as if into a scrapbook of respiratory memories.
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Bill Bryson |
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86340b1
|
and it occurred to me, with the forcefulness of a thought experienced in 360 degrees, that that's really what history mostly is: masses of people doing ordinary things.
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life
ordinary
|
Bill Bryson |
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2ce8d06
|
This was 1990 the year that communism died in Europe and it seemed strange to me that in all the words that were written about the fall of the iron curtain, nobody anywhere lamented that it was the end of a noble experiment. I know that communism never worked and I would have disliked living under it myself but none the less it seems that there was a kind of sadness in the thought that the only economic system that appeared to work was one ..
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greed
communism
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Bill Bryson |
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664545d
|
About Uluru] I'm suggesting nothing here, but I will say that if you were an intergalactic traveler who had broken down in our solar system, the obvious directions to rescuers would be: "Go to the third planet and fly around till you see the big red rock. You can't miss it." If ever on earth they dig up a 150,000-year-old rocket ship from the galaxy Zog, this is where it will be. I'm not saying I expect it to happen; not saying that at all...
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Bill Bryson |
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be2ba9a
|
On the dashboard of our family car is a shallow indentation about the size of a paperback book. If you are looking for somewhere to put your sunglasses or spare change, it is the obvious place, and it works extremely well, I must say, so long as the car is not actually moving. However, as soon as you put the car in motion ... everything slides off ... It can hold nothing that has not been nailed to it. So I ask you: what then is it for?
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Bill Bryson |
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271248c
|
We have a universe. It is a place of most wondrous and gratifying possibility, and beautiful, too. And it was all done in about the time it takes to make a sandwich.
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Bill Bryson |