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d1fb2f9
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In three minutes, 98 percent of all the matter there is or will ever be has been produced. We have a universe
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Bill Bryson |
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1ea1ca6
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I wanted a little of that swagger that comes with being able to gaze at a far 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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1f11b25
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It was known as the Sick Man of Europe. It was in every way poorer than now. Yet there were flowerbeds on roundabouts, libraries and post offices in every village, cottage hospitals in abundance, council housing for all who needed it. It was a country so comfortable and enlightened that hospitals maintained cricket pitches for their staff and mental patients lived in Victorian palaces. If we could afford it then, why not now? Someone needs ..
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Bill Bryson |
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9b8eaf5
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It was an odd situation. For a century and a half, men got rid of their own hair, which was perfectly comfortable, and instead covered their heads with something foreign and uncomfortable. Very often it was actually their own hair made into a wig. People who couldn't afford wigs tried to make their hair look like a wig.
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history
humor
wig
hair
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Bill Bryson |
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60dcb4c
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And there was never a better time to delve for pleasure in language than the sixteenth century, when novelty blew through English like a spring breeze. Some twelve thousand words, a phenomenal number, entered the language between 1500 and 1650, about half of them still in use today, and old words were employed in ways not tried before. Nouns became verbs and adverbs; adverbs became adjectives. Expressions that could not have grammatically e..
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words
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Bill Bryson |
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791a692
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Is it raining out?' the reception girl asked brightly as I filled in the registration card between sneezes and pauses to wipe water from my face with the back of my arm. 'No, my ship sank and I had to swim the last seven miles.
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Bill Bryson |
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ccbf62d
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So I decided to do it [hike the Appalachian Trail]. More rashly, I announced my intention - told friends and neighbors, confidently informed my publisher, made it common knowledge among those who knew me. Then I bought some books... It required only a little light reading in adventure books and almost no imagination to envision circumstances in which I would find myself caught in a tightening circle of hunger-emboldened wolves, staggering a..
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Bill Bryson |
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bd795f2
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Dogs don't like me. It is a simple law of the universe, like gravity. I am not exaggerating when I say that I have never passed a dog that didn't act as if it thought I was about to take its Alpo. Dogs that have not moved from the sofa in years will, at the sniff of me passing outside, rise in fury and hurl themselves at shut windows. I have seen tiny dogs, no bigger than a fluffy slipper, jerk little old ladies off their feet and drag them..
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Bill Bryson |
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76c83ae
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It's a bit burned," my mother would say apologetically at every meal, presenting you with a piece of meat that looked like something -- a much-loved pet perhaps -- salvaged from a tragic house fire. "But I think I scraped off most of the burned part," she would add, overlooking that this included every bit of it that had once been flesh. Happily, all this suited my father. His palate only responded to two tastes - burned and ice cream -- s..
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humor
parents
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Bill Bryson |
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6d93d52
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A computer is a stupid machine with the ability to do incredibly smart things, while computer programmers are smart people with the ability to do incredibly stupid things.
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technology
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Bill Bryson |
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0839173
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To tell you the truth, I'm amazed we've come this far," he said, and I agreed. We had hiked 500 miles, a million and a quarter steps, since setting off from Amicalola. We had grounds to be proud. We were real hikers now. We had shit in the woods and slept with bears. We had become, we would forever be, mountain men."
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Bill Bryson |
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bb4c29a
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Columbus's real achievement was managing to cross the ocean successfully in both directions. Though an accomplished enough mariner, he was not terribly good at a great deal else, especially geography, the skill that would seem most vital in an explorer. It would be hard to name any figure in history who has achieved more lasting fame with less competence. He spent large parts of eight years bouncing around Caribbean islands and coastal Sout..
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columbus-day
columbus
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Bill Bryson |
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087e369
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We're going to stop this preposterous obsession with economic growth at the cost of all else. Great economic success doesn't produce national happiness. It produces Republicans and Switzerland. So we're going to concentrate on just being lovely and pleasant and civilized. We're going to have the best schools and hospitals, the most comfortable public transportation, the liveliest arts, the most useful and well-stocked libraries, the grandes..
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Bill Bryson |
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b7e0c76
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The dandelion was long popularly known as the 'pissabed' because of its supposed diuretic properties, and other names in everyday use included 'mare's fart', 'naked ladies', 'twitch-ballock', 'hounds-piss', 'open arse', and 'bum-towel'.
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Bill Bryson |
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7f1dd51
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it occurred to me, not for the first time, what a remarkably small world Britain is. That is its glory, you see--that it manages at once to be intimate and small scale, and at the same time packed to bursting with incident and interest. I am constantly filled with admiration at this--at the way you can wander through a town like Oxford and in the space of a few hundred yards pass the home of Christopher Wren, the buildings where Halley foun..
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Bill Bryson |
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88e5edd
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London isn't a place at all. It's a million little places.
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Bill Bryson |
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749691b
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Among the many thousands of things that I have never been able to understand, one in particular stands out. That is the question of who was the first person who stood by a pile of sand and said, "You know, I bet if we took some of this and mixed it with a little potash and heated it, we could make a material that would be solid and yet transparent. We could call it glass." Call me obtuse, but you could stand me on a beach till the end of ti..
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Bill Bryson |
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9faa568
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As we parted at the Natural History Museum in London, I asked Richard Fortey how science ensures that when one person goes there's someone ready to take his place. He chuckled rather heartily at my naivete. 'I'm afraid it's not as if we have substitutes sitting on the bench somewhere waiting to be called in to play. When a specialist retires or, even more unfortunately, dies, that can bring a stop to things in that field, sometimes for a ve..
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science
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Bill Bryson |
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86e018d
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Three hundred types of mussel, a third of the world's total, live in the Smokies. Smokies mussels have terrific names, like purple wartyback, shiny pigtoe, and monkeyface pearlymussel. Unfortunately, that is where all interest in them ends. Because they are so little regarded, even by naturalists, mussels have vanished at an exceptional rate. Nearly half of all Smokies mussels species are endangered; twelve are thought to be extinct. This o..
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nature
mussels
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Bill Bryson |
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f1eedb2
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Nothing - really, absolutely nothing - says more about Victorian Britain and its capacity for brilliance than that the century's most daring and iconic building was entrusted to a gardener.
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humor
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Bill Bryson |
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dc282c0
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To an American the whole purpose of living, the one constant confirmation of continued existence, is to cram as much as sensual pleasure as possible into one's mouth more or less continuously. Gratification, instant and lavish, is a birthright
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Bill Bryson |
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5490276
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If you go back sixty-four generations, to the time of the Romans, the number of people on whose cooperative efforts your eventual existence depends has risen to approximately one million trillion, which is several thousand times the total number of people who have ever lived!.
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Bill Bryson |
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a995f15
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If a potato can produce vitamin C, why can't we? Within the animal kingdom only humans and guinea pigs are unable to synthesize vitamin C in their own bodies. Why us and guinea pigs? No point asking. Nobody knows.
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supplements
vitamin-c
trivia
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Bill Bryson |
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afd4454
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I don't know why religious zealots have this compulsion to try to convert everyone who passes before them - I don't go around trying to make them into St Louis Cardinals fans, for Christ's sake - and yet they never fail to try. Nowadays when accosted I explain to them that anyone wearing white socks with Hush Puppies and a badge saying HI! I'M GUS! probably couldn't talk me into getting out of a burning car, much less into making a lifelong..
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Bill Bryson |
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1f7e8d7
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Pantaloons were often worn tight as paint and were not a great deal less revealing, particularly as they were worn without underwear. . . . Jackets were tailored with tails in the back, but were cut away in front so that they perfectly framed the groin. It was the first time in history that men's apparel was consciously designed to be more sexy than women's.
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sex-appeal
modesty
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Bill Bryson |
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d738ea9
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For the moment we might very well can them DUNNOS (for Dark Unknown Nonreflective Nondetectable Objects Somewhere).
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humour
science
space
physics
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Bill Bryson |
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bfbf8a8
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We wanted proper outback: a place where men were men and sheep were nervous.
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Bill Bryson |
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2b0bb97
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I had recently read to my dismay that they have started hunting moose again in New England. Goodness knows why anyone would want to shoot an animal as harmless and retiring as the moose, but thousands of people do--so many, in fact, that states now hold lotteries to decide who gets a permit. Maine in 1996 received 82,000 applications for just 1,500 permits. Over 12,000 outof-staters happily parted with a nonrefundable $20 just to be allowed..
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Bill Bryson |
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d532845
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By the time I had finished my coffee and returned to the streets, the rain had temporarily abated, but the streets were full of vast puddles where the drains where unable to cope with the volume of water. Correct me if I'm wrong, but you would think that if one nation ought by now to have mastered the science of drainage, Britain would be it.
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travel
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Bill Bryson |
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bba050c
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Look, if you draw a two thousand-mile-long line across the United States at any angle, it's going to pass through nine murder victims.
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Bill Bryson |
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ef67fbc
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One idea to a sentence is still the best advice that anyone has ever given on writing.
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writing-advice
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Bill Bryson |
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c392d81
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What sets the carbon atom apart is that it is shamelessly promiscuous.
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Bill Bryson |
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4ffab9a
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The 1920s was a great time for reading altogether--very possibly the peak decade for reading in American life. Soon it would be overtaken by the passive distractions of radio, but for the moment reading remained most people's principal method for filling idle time.
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Bill Bryson |
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d510b9a
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Confused and unable to help, my hair went into panic mode.
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Bill Bryson |
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39aa9ff
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It wasn't until we dropped him at his university dormitory and left him there looking touchingly lost and bewildered amid an assortment of cardboard boxes and suitcases in a spartan room not unlike a prison cell that it really hit home that he was vanishing out of our lives and into his own.
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love
growing-up
parenthood
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Bill Bryson |
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24d75e0
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I am not, I regret to say, a discreet and fetching sleeper. Most people when they nod off look as if they could do with a blanket; I look as if I could do with medical attention. I sleep as if injected with a powerful experimental muscle relaxant. My legs fall open in a grotesque come-hither manner; my knuckles brush the floor. Whatever is inside--tongue, uvula, moist bubbles of intestinal air--decides to leak out. From time to time, like o..
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Bill Bryson |
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cdcfbbb
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Most of the time I am sunk in thought, but at some point on each walk there comes a moment when I look up and notice, with a kind of first-time astonishment, the amazing complex delicacy of the words, the casual ease with which elemental things come together to form a composition that is--whatever the season, wherever I put my besotted gaze--perfect.
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nature
mountaineering
outdoors
wilderness
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Bill Bryson |
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b29eacd
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When the Duke [W.J.C. Scott-Bentinck] died, his heirs found all of the aboveground rooms devoid of furnishings except for one chamber in the middle of which sat the Duke's commode. The main hall was mysteriously floor less. Most of the rooms were painted pink. The one upstairs room in which the Duke had resided was packed to the ceiling with hundreds of green boxes, each of which contained a single dark brown wig. This was, in short, a man ..
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Bill Bryson |
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e891f92
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Do you like that?" I'll say in surprise since it doesn't seem like her type of thing, and she'll look at me as if I'm mad. That!?" She'll say, "No, it's hideous" Then why on earth," I always want to say, "did you walk all the way over there to touch it?" but of course...I have learned to say nothing when shopping because no matter what you say... Read more - "I'm hungry", "I'm bored", "My feet are tired", "Yes, that one looks nice on you ..
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Bill Bryson |
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62c1399
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It is not true that the English invented cricket as a way of making all other human endeavors look interesting and lively; that was merely an unintended side effect.
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humorous
humour
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Bill Bryson |
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bb2c43b
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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 viatmin C as the average person today.
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paleo
farming
health
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Bill Bryson |
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846a404
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For you to be here now, trillions of drifting atoms had somehow to assemble in an intricate and curiously obliging manner to create you.
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Bill Bryson |
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b72a9c1
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I had recently read that 3.7 million Americans, according to a Gallup poll, believed that they had been abducted by aliens at one time or another, so it was clear that my people needed me." --On his move back to America after living in England for twenty years."
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Bill Bryson |
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44a6561
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a waitress came out and plonked in front of each of us a small standard terra-cotta flowerpot in which had been baked a little loaf of bread. "What's this?" I asked. "It's bread," she replied. "But it's in a flowerpot?" She gave me a look that I was beginning to think of as the Darwin stare. It was a look that said, "Yeah? So?" "Well, isn't that kind of unusual?" She considered for a moment. "Is a bit, I suppose." "And will we be following ..
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Bill Bryson |