|
ee2b578
|
I noticed, as I often noticed at English soccer matches, that I was the only person in the stadium enjoying himself. The rest of the spectators, on both sides, were perpetually stressed and dismayed. A man behind me was simply full of despair. "Now why did he do that?" he would say. "What was he thinking? Why didn't he pass it?" His companion seemed to have some issues with eighteenth century German metaphysics because he kept saying over a..
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
c55e709
|
Houses aren't refuges from history. They are where history ends up.
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
8d0ceaa
|
The youth of Idaho falls should be encouraged to take drugs in order to cope up with the fact that there is plutonium in their drinking water.
|
|
idaho
plutonium
|
Bill Bryson |
|
26d1585
|
We are so used to having a lot of comfort in our lives--to being clean, warm, and well fed--that we forget how recent most of that is. In fact, achieving these things took forever, and then they mostly came in a rush.
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
c8bb7c5
|
It is a slightly arresting notion that if you were to pick yourself apart with tweezers, one atom at a time, you would produce a mound of fine atomic dust, none of which had ever been alive but all of which had once been you.)
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
c74df52
|
What a wonderful world that was, and how remote it seems now. It is a challenge to believe that there was ever a time that airline food was exciting, when stewardesses were happy to see you, when flying was such an occasion that you wore your finest clothes. I grew up in a world in which everything was like that: shopping malls, TV dinners, TV itself, supermarkets, freeways, air conditioning, drive-in movies, 3D movies, transistor radios, b..
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
2d05161
|
Human memories are short and inaccurate.
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
730be3c
|
I read once that it takes 75,000 trees to produce one issue of the Sunday New York Times -- and it's well worth every trembling leaf. So what if our grandchildren have no oxygen to breathe? Fuck 'em.
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
cacb712
|
Whatever happens in the world - whatever is discovered or created or bitterly fought over - eventually ends up, in one way or another, in your house. Wars, famine, the Industrial Revolution, the Enlightenment - they are all there in your sofas and chests of drawers, tucked into the folds of your curtains, in the downy softness of your pillows, in the paint on your walls and the water in your pipes. So the history of household life isn't jus..
|
|
houses
home
|
Bill Bryson |
|
9da2d31
|
As humans we are inclined to feel that life must have a point. We have plans and aspirations and desires. We want to take constant advantage of all the intoxicating existence we've been endowed with. But what's life to a cell? Yet it's impulse to exist, to be, is every bit as strong as ours - perhaps even stronger. Life just wants to be.
|
|
existence
history
life
desires
impulse
humans
|
Bill Bryson |
|
f8acf6d
|
I have been told more than once in fact that one of the more trying things about learning to live with the Germans after the war was having to watch them return with their wives and girlfriends to show off the places they had helped to ruin.
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
2f00c5a
|
If the mattress stains were anything to go by, a previous user had not so much suffered from incontinence as rejoiced in it. He had evidently included the pillow in his celebrations. I lifted it and sniffed it, then wished I hadn't.
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
9b0c89a
|
IT WASN'T THAT MY MOTHER AND FATHER were indifferent to their children's physical well-being by any means. It was just that they seemed to believe that everything would be fine in the end and they were always right.
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
65ae17b
|
Anyway, we did it," Katz said at last, looking up. He noted my quizzical expression. "Hiked Maine, I mean." I looked at him. "Stephen, we didn't even see Mount Katahdin." He dismissed this as a petty quibble. "Another mountain," he said. "How many do you need to see, Bryson?" I snorted a small laugh. "Well, that's one way of looking at it." "It's the only way of looking at it," Katz went on and quite earnestly. "As far as I'm concerned, I h..
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
751f21b
|
In January of that year, according to a report written in America by a Times reporter, scientists were seriously investigating the possibility that a mysterious seismic disturbance in the remote Australian outback almost four years earlier had been a nuclear explosion set off by members of the Japanese doomsday cult Aum Shinrikyo.
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
43355c0
|
This is comfortable and clean and familiar. Apart from a tendency among men of a certain age to wear knee-high socks with shorts, these people are just like you and me.
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
0e5572d
|
So you must be the guys she was talking about." "Really?" Katz said. "What'd she say?" "Oh, nothing," he said, but he was suppressing a small smile in that way that makes you say: "What?" "Nothing. It was nothing." But he was smiling. "What?" He wavered. "Oh, all right. She said you guys were a couple of overweight wimps who didn't know the first thing about hiking and that she was tired of carrying you." "She said that?" Katz said, scandal..
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
b4d9aa6
|
This is something that has been puzzling me for years. Women will stand there watching their items being rung up, and then when the till lady says, 'That's PS4.20, love,' or whatever, they suddenly look as if they've never done this sort of thing before. They go 'Oh!' and start rooting in a flustered fashion in their handbag for their purse or chequebook, as if no-one had told them that this might happen.
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
b69223b
|
For 2 billion years this is all the life there was on earth, but in that time the stromatolites raised the oxygen level in the atmosphere to 20 percent--enough to allow the development of other, more complex life-forms: me, for instance. My gratitude was real.
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
8f39fdd
|
Pilchard begins his long run in from short stump. He bowls and ... oh, he's out! Yes, he's got him. Longwilley is caught leg-before in middle slops by Grattan. Well, now what do you make of that, Neville?' 'That's definitely one for the books, Bruce. I don't think I've seen offside medium slow fast pace bowling to match it since Baden-Powell took Rangachangabanga for a maiden ovary at Bangalore in 1948.' I had stumbled into the surreal and ..
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
8108c8e
|
Soon levees up and down the river were popping like buttons off a tight shirt. At Mounds Landing, Mississippi, a hundred black workers, kept at their posts by men with rifles, were swept to oblivion when a levee gave way. The coroner, for reasons unstated, recorded just two deaths.
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
0d019b2
|
Don't ever do anything on principle alone. If you haven't got a better reason for doing something other than the principle of the thing, then don't do it.
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
ca69dc3
|
Take it from me, if you are in an open space with no weapons and a grizzly comes for you, run. You may as well. If nothing else, it will give you something to do with the last seven seconds of your life.
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
50e4ea9
|
The thing about Ayers Rock is that by the time you finally get there you are already a little sick of it.
|
|
travel
ayers-rock
|
Bill Bryson |
|
447ce94
|
You are totally at the mercy of nature in this country, mate. It's just a fact of life.
|
|
mother-nature
survival
|
Bill Bryson |
|
d40e725
|
Indeed, to them people are overweight creatures in baseball caps who spread lots and lots of food out on picnic tables and then shriek a little and waddle off to get their video cameras when old Mr. Bear comes along and climbs onto the table and starts devouring their potato salad and chocolate cake. Since the bear doesn't mind being filmed and indeed seems indifferent to his audience, pretty generally some fool will come up to it and try t..
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
bd96198
|
An Australian fly will try to suck the moisture off your eyeball. He will, if not constantly turned back, go into parts of your ears that a Q-tip can only dream about. He will happily die for the glory of taking a tiny dump on your tongue. Get thirty or forty of them dancing around you in the same way and madness will shortly follow. And
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
1ba7c02
|
You have no engagements, commitments, obligations, or duties; no special ambitions and only the smallest, least complicated of wants; you exist in a tranquil tedium, serenely beyond the reach of exasperation, "far removed from the seats of strife," as the early explorer and botanist William Bartram put it. All that is required of you is a willingness to trudge." --
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
2948f48
|
They climbed back into the dish with brooms and scrubbing brushes and carefully swept it clean of what they referred to in a later paper as "white dielectric material," or what is known more commonly as bird shit."
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
f56dc08
|
Among the words first found in Shakespeare are abstemious, antipathy, critical, frugal, dwindle, extract, horrid, vast, hereditary, critical, excellent, eventful, barefaced, assassination, lonely, leapfrog, indistinguishable, well-read, zany, and countless others (including countless).
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
d3342cd
|
Hunters will tell you that a moose is a wily and ferocious forest creature. Nonsense. A moose is a cow drawn by a three-year-old.
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
39fd06a
|
Yet Malone, remarkably, was a model of restraint compared with others, such as John Payne Collier, who was also a scholar of great gifts, but grew so frustrated at the difficulty of finding physical evidence concerning Shakespeare's life that he began to create his own, forging documents to bolster his arguments if not, ultimately, his reputation. He was eventually exposed when the keeper of mineralogy at the British Museum proved with a se..
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
16535cb
|
There is something about the pace and scale of British life - an appreciation of small pleasures, a kind of restraint with respect to greed, generally speaking - that makes life strangely agreeable. The British really are the only people in the world who become genuinely enlivened when presented with a hot beverage and a small plain biscuit.
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
daf9365
|
Britain has 450,000 listed buildings, 20,000 scheduled ancient monuments, twenty-six World Heritage Sites, 1,624 registered parks and gardens (that is, gardens and parks of historic significance), 600,000 known archaeological sites (and more being found every day; more being lost, too), 3,500 historic cemeteries, 70,000 war memorials, 4,000 sites of special scientific interest, 18,500 medieval churches, and 2,500 museums containing 170 mill..
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
02a89ea
|
The one thing we have in common with all other living things is that for nearly four billion years our ancestors have managed to slip through a series of closing doors every time we needed them to. Stephen Jay Gould expressed it succinctly in a well-known line: "Humans are here today because our particular line never fractured--never once at any of the billion points that could have erased us from history."
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
54650e4
|
On my first visit, some years ago, I passed the time on the long flight from London reading a history of Australian politics in the twentieth century, wherein I encountered the startling fact that in 1967 the Prime Minister, Harold Holt, was strolling along a beach in Victoria when he plunged into the surf and vanished. No trace of the poor man was ever seen again. This seemed doubly astounding to me - first that Australia could just lose a..
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
e4e345a
|
Life on Earth, you see, is not only brief but dismayingly tenuous.
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
005215d
|
Work expands to fill the time available for its completion," still known as Parkinson's Law."
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
abed5d4
|
Our word "salary" comes literally from the vulgar Latin salarium, "salt money"--the Roman soldier's ironic term for what it would buy."
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
6078e26
|
There is no question that a Neanderthal could easily beat us up. So, too, presumably could their women, which may be why we are only 2 percent Neanderthal instead of 50 percent. Those bitches were too scary for us. Nearby
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
081257e
|
Others did not fare so well. A German man in St. Louis who was believed to have spoken ill of his adopted country was set upon by a mob, dragged through the streets tied up in an American flag, and hanged. A jury subsequently found the mob leaders not guilty on the grounds that it had been a "patriotic murder."
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
0faffce
|
untimely death is a common but really quite inane expression. When ever was a death timely?
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
14e54a7
|
The early colonists were among the first to use the new word goodbye, contracted from God be with you and still at that time often spelled Godbwye,
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
9776769
|
when a person says to you, "How do you do?" he will be taken aback if you reply, with impeccable logic, "How do I do what?" The complexities of the English language are"
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |