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ce798e3
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The older you get the more it seems the world belongs to other people.
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Bill Bryson |
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d9d37bd
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This wouldn't be so bad, I told myself. But secretly, I knew that I was quite wrong.
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Bill Bryson |
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cc9a8e5
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I was especially riveted by an amateur photograph in Herrero's book, taken late at night by a camper with a flash at a campground out West. The photograph caught four black bears as they puzzled over a suspended food bag. The bears were clearly startled but not remotely alarmed by the flash. It was not the size or demeanor of the bears that troubled me -- they looked almost comically unagressive, like four guys who had gotten a Frisbee caug..
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Bill Bryson |
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31fbb57
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I used to give X-ray vision a lot of thought because I couldn't see how it could work. I mean, if you could see through people's clothing, then surely you would also see through their skin and right into their bodies. You would see blood vessels, pulsing organs, food being digested and pushed through coils of bowel, and much else of a gross and undesirable nature. Even if you could somehow confine your X-rays to rosy epidermis, any body you..
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kids
imagination
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Bill Bryson |
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55c5608
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Only one man had the circumstances and gifts to give us such incomparable works, and William Shakespeare of Stratfrod was unquestionably that man -- whoever he was.
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Bill Bryson |
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17725c4
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Perhaps nothing speaks more eloquently of the variability of spelling in the age than the fact that a dictionary published in 1604, A Table Alphabeticall of Hard Words, spelled "words" two ways on the title page."
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Bill Bryson |
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8be75bb
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Every human body consists of about 10 quadrillion cells, but about 100 quadrillion bacterial cells. They are, in short, a big part of us. From the bacteria's point of view, of course, we are a rather small part of them.
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Bill Bryson |
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b446d57
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and let's face it, the French Army couldn't beat a girls hockey team
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france
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Bill Bryson |
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e9653ce
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One consequential change is that people used to get most of their calories at breakfast and midday, with only the evening top-up at suppertime. Now those intakes are almost exactly reversed. Most of us consume the bulk--a sadly appropriate word here--of our calories in the evening and take them to bed with us, a practice that doesn't do any good at all.
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mealtime
calories
dinner
lunch
food
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Bill Bryson |
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4baed05
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I love a sunburnt country, A land of sweeping plains, Of ragged mountain ranges, Of droughts and flooding rains.
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Bill Bryson |
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c8e029c
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I like being in a country where when cows attack, word of it gets around. That's what I mean when I say Britain is cozy.
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Bill Bryson |
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48b2698
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Americans] were, for one thing, so smitten with the idea of progress that they invented things without having any idea whether those things would be of any use.
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progress
invention
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Bill Bryson |
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64205bb
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You may not feel outstandingly robust, but if you are an average-sized adult you will contain within your modest frame no less than 7 X 10^18 joules of potential energy--enough to explode with the force of thirty very large hydrogen bombs, assuming you knew how to liberate it and really wished to make a point. Everything has this kind of energy trapped within it. We're just not very good at getting it out. Even a uranium bomb--the most ener..
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Bill Bryson |
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13b27a7
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I had come to realize that I didn't have any feelings towards the AT that weren't thoroughly contradictory. I was weary of the trail, but captivated by it; found the endless slog increasingly exhausting but ever invigorating; grew tired of the boundless woods but admired their boundlessness; enjoyed the escape from civilization and ached for its comforts. All of this together, all at once, every moment, on the trail or off.
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Bill Bryson |
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e4cac10
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By the 1920s if you wanted to work behind a lunch counter you needed to know that 'Noah's boy' was a slice of ham (since Ham was one of Noah's sons) and that 'burn one' or 'grease spot' designated a hamburger. 'He'll take a chance' or 'clean the kitchen' meant an order of hash, 'Adam and Eve on a raft' was two poached eggs on toast, 'cats' eyes' was tapioca pudding, 'bird seed' was cereal, 'whistleberries' were baked beans, and 'dough well ..
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humor
language
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Bill Bryson |
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4e90515
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As James Surowiecki noted in a New Yorker article, given a choice between developing antibiotics that people will take every day for two weeks and antidepressants that people will take every day for ever, drug companies not surprisingly opt for the latter. Although a few antibiotics have been toughened up a bit, the pharmaceutical industry hasn't given us an entirely new antibiotic since the 1970s.
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Bill Bryson |
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4ad995e
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The American woods have been unnerving people for 300 years. The inestimably priggish and tiresome Henry David Thoreau thought nature was splendid, splendid indeed, so long as he could stroll to town for cakes and barley wine, but when he experienced real wilderness, on a vist to Katahdin in 1846, he was unnerved to the cored. This wasn't the tame world of overgrown orchards and sun-dappled paths that passed for wilderness in suburban Conco..
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nature
hiking
thoreau
wilderness
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Bill Bryson |
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810b4c9
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Not even much survives as memory. Many of the most notable names of the summer--Richard Byrd, Sacco and Vanzetti, Gene Tunney, even Charles Lindbergh--are rarely encountered now, and most of the others are never heard at all. So it is perhaps worth pausing for a moment to remember just some of the things that happened that summer: Babe Ruth hit sixty home runs. The Federal Reserve made the mistake that precipitated the stock market crash. A..
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Bill Bryson |
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8c017b2
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The pleasant fact is that the British are not much good at violent crime except in fiction, which is of course as it should be.
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travel
humour
humor
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Bill Bryson |
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dee6135
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The Forest Service is truly an extraordinary institution. A lot of people, seeing that word forest in the title, assume it has something to do with looking after trees. In fact, no--though that was the original plan.
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Bill Bryson |
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263e53c
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Four times I was honked at for having the temerity to proceed through town without the benefit of metal.
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walking
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Bill Bryson |
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f0e65c0
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I HAD TO GO to America for a while to give some talks. Going to America always does me good. It's where I'm from, after all. There's baseball on the TV, people are friendly and upbeat, they don't obsess about the weather except when there is weather worth obsessing about, you can have all the ice cubes you want. Above all, visiting America gives me perspective. Consider two small experiences I had upon arriving at a hotel in downtown Austin..
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Bill Bryson |
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933a802
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I remember reading once how some Stone Age Indians from the Brazilian rain forest with no knowledge or expectation of a world beyond the jungle were taken to Sao Paulo or Rio, and when they saw what it contained-the buildings, the cars, the passing airplanes-and how thoroughly at variance it was with their own simple lives, they wet themselves, lavishly and in unison. I believe I had some idea how they felt. It is such a strange contrast. W..
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nature
modernity
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Bill Bryson |
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604c484
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Whereas the food debris of the Neanderthals shows a wide variety of animal bones, suggesting that they took whatever they could find, archaeological remnants from Homo sapiens show that they sought out particular kinds of game and tracked animals seasonally. All of this strongly suggests that they possessed a linguistic system sufficiently sophisticated to deal with concepts such as: "Today let's kill some red deer. You take some big sticks..
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Bill Bryson |
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3fe93c8
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I stood in a Burger King and studied, with absorption, the photographs of the manager and his executive crew (reflecting on the curious fact that people who go into hamburger management always look as if their mother slept with Goofy),
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Bill Bryson |
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2cc8596
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Salamanders are interesting, and don't let anyone tell you otherwise.
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Bill Bryson |
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a4f7327
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Every day in every way I am getting better and better."*"
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Bill Bryson |
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e165f4a
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In office buildings and retail premises in which entry is through double doors and one of those doors is locked for no reason, the door must bear a large sign saying: "This Door Is Locked for No Reason."
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Bill Bryson |
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f7e1dfe
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It is often said that what sets Shakespeare apart is his ability to illuminate the workings of the soul and so on, and he does that superbly, goodness knows, but what really characterizes his work - every bit of it, in poems and plays and even dedications, throughout every portion of his career - is a positive and palpable appreciation of the transfixing power of language. remains an enchanting work after four hundred years, but few could..
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shakespeare
poems
dedications
four-hundred-years
goodness-knows
joyous-possibilities
transfixing
verbal-expression
workings-of-the-soul
the-soul
enchanting
human-behavior
power-of-language
plays
human-behaviour
possibilities
william-shakespeare
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Bill Bryson |
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e9f37d3
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The poet Robert Browning caused considerable consternation by including the word in one of his poems, thinking it an innocent term. The work was , written in 1841 and now remembered for the line "God's in His heaven, all's right with the world." But it also contains this disconcerting passage: Then owls and bats Cowls and twats Monks and nuns in a cloister's moods, Adjourn to the oak-stump pantry! Browning had apparently somewhere come ..
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Bill Bryson |
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106b428
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More recently, during a debate in the House of Lords in 1978 one of the members said: "If there is a more hideous language on the face of the earth than the American form of English, I should like to know what it is." (We should perhaps bear in mind that the House of Lords is a largely powerless, nonelective institution. It is an arresting fact of British political life that a Briton can enjoy a national platform and exalted status because ..
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politics
humor
english
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Bill Bryson |
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07e7327
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Victorian rigidities were such that ladies were not even allowed to blow out candles in mixed company, as that required them to pucker their lips suggestively. They could not say that they were going "to bed"--that planted too stimulating an image--but merely that they were "retiring." It became effectively impossible to discuss clothing in even a clinical sense without resort to euphemisms. Trousers became "nether integuments" or simply "i..
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underwear
victorian-era
modesty
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Bill Bryson |
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c6bef55
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Traveling] makes you realize what an immeasurably nice place much of America could be if only people possessed the same instinct for preservation as they do in Europe. You would think the millions of people who come to Williamsburg every year would say to each other, "Gosh, Bobbi, this place is beautiful. Let's go home to Smellville and plant lots of trees and preserve all the fine old buildings." But in fact that never occurs to them. They..
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travel
historic-preservation
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Bill Bryson |
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86ca884
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If the mattress stains were anything to go by, a previous user had not so much suffered from incontinence as rejoiced in it.
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Bill Bryson |
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4df10b4
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Consider the fact that for 3.8 billion years, a period of time older than the Earth's mountains and rivers and oceans, every one of your forebears on both sides has been attractive enough to find a mate, healthy enough to reproduce, and sufficiently blessed by fate and circumstances to live long enough to do so
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Bill Bryson |
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eebf637
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Because of social strictures against even the mildest swearing, America developed a particularly rich crop of euphemistic expletives - darn, durn, goldurn, goshdad, goshdang, goshawful, blast, consarn, confound, by Jove, by jingo, great guns, by the great horn spoon (a nonce term first cited in the Biglow Papers), jo-fired, jumping Jehoshaphat, and others almost without number - but even this cautious epithets could land people in trouble a..
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humor
swearing
language
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Bill Bryson |
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11f4e68
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They talk about big skies in the western United States, and they may indeed have them, but you have never seen such lofty clouds, such towering anvils, as in Iowa in July.
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midwest
clouds
july
skies
storms
west
iowa
weather
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Bill Bryson |
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e7a775b
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As I always used to tell Thomas Wolfe, there are three things you just can't do in life. You can't beat the phone company, you can't make a waiter see you until he's ready to see you, and you can't go home again.
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Bill Bryson |
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98471ae
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In answer to the question of why it happened, I offer the modest proposal that our Universe is simply one of those things which happen from time to time.
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Bill Bryson |
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518077e
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Australians are the biggest gamblers on the planet - one of the more arresting statistics I saw was that the country has less than 1 per cent of the world's population but more than 20 per cent of its slot machines
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Bill Bryson |
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a30992d
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Plants began the process of land colonization about 450 million years ago, accompanied of necessity by tiny mites and other organisms which they needed to break down and recycle dead organic matter on their behalf. Larger animals took a little longer to emerge, but by about 400 million years ago they were venturing out of the water, too. Popular illustrations have encouraged us to envision the first venturesome land dwellers as a kind of am..
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Bill Bryson |
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cb20a1c
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An asteroid or comet traveling at cosmic velocities would enter the Earth's atmosphere at such a speed that the air beneath it couldn't get out of the way and would be compressed, as in a bicycle pump. As anyone who has used such a pump knows, compressed air grows swiftly hot, and the temperature below it would rise to some 60,000 Kelvin, or ten times the surface temperature of the Sun. In this instant of its arrival in our atmosphere, ever..
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Bill Bryson |
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390fd28
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Shakespeare 'never owned a book,' a writer for the New York Times gravely informed readers in one doubting article in 2002. The statement cannot actually be refuted, for we know nothing about his incidental possessions. But the writer might just as well have suggested that Shakespeare never owned a pair of shoes or pants. For all the evidence tells us, he spent his life naked from the waist down, as well as bookless, but it is probably that..
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shakespeare
history
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Bill Bryson |
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be417e2
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When you write books for a living, you come to realize that while not all people who write to authors are strange, all people who are strange write to authors.
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Bill Bryson |