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bda29bc
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Noting the lack of crime or security in the Netherlands, the author asked a native who guarded a national landmark. He got the replay, "We all do."
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community
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Bill Bryson |
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5b93605
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I hate to sound like an old man, but why are these people famous? What qualities do they possess that endear them to the wider world? We may at once eliminate talent, intelligence, attractiveness, and charm from the equation, so what does that leave? Dainty feet? Fresh, minty breath? I am at a loss to say. Anatomically, many of them don't even seem quite human. Many have names that suggest they have reached us from a distant galaxy: Ri-Ri, ..
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Bill Bryson |
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6825a8a
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But I love to drink. I can't help it. I mean, I love it Bryson-love the taste, love that buzz you get when you've had a couple, love the smell and feel of the taverns. I miss dirty jokes and the click of pool balls in the background, and that kind of bluish, under lit glow of a bar at night.
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Bill Bryson |
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fdb0adb
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I now know that there is a happy abundance of science writers who pen the most lucid and thrilling prose--Timothy Ferris, Richard Fortey and Tim Flannery are three that jump out from a single station of the alphabet (and that's not even to mention the late but godlike Richard Feynman)--but, sadly, none of them wrote any textbook I ever used.
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Bill Bryson |
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806cf39
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On the fourth night, just as I was facing the dismal prospect of finishing my only book and thereafter having nothing to do in the evenings but lie in the half light and listen to Katz snore, I was delighted, thrilled, sublimely gratified to find that some earlier user had left a Graham Greene paperback. If there's one thing the AT teaches, it is low level ecstasy, something we can all do with more of in our lives
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Bill Bryson |
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50fa512
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And now the state was about to bring the law back, proving conclusively that the danger for Tennesseans isn't so much that they may be descended from apes as overtaken by them.
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Bill Bryson |
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809d930
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When I asked her once why she didn't walk to the gym and do five minutes less on the treadmill, she looked at me as if I were being willfully provocative. "Because I have a program for the treadmill," she explained. "It records my distance and speed, and I can adjust it for degree of difficulty." It hadn't occurred to me how thoughtlessly deficient nature is in this regard."
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Bill Bryson |
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add3f9a
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I had never really stopped to consider what an extraordinary thing the Royal National Lifeboat Institution is. Think about it. A troubled ship calls for help, and eight people - teachers, plumbers, the guy who runs the pub - drop everything and put to sea, whatever the weather, asking no questions, imperilling their own lives, to try to help strangers. Is there anything more brave and noble than that?
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Bill Bryson |
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e2f1112
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Although the Principia has been called 'one of the most inaccessible books ever written'7 (Newton intentionally made it difficult so that he wouldn't be pestered by mathematical 'smatterers', as he called them), it was a beacon to those who could follow it. It not only explained mathematically the orbits of heavenly bodies, but also identified the attractive force that got them moving in the first place - gravity. Suddenly every motion in t..
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Bill Bryson |
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ddabd08
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Eventually, mercifully, the waitress prised the spoons out of our hands and took the dessert stuff away, and we were able to stumble zombielike out into the night.
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humor
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Bill Bryson |
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c91b52e
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You are totally at the mercy of nature in this country, mate. It's just a fact of life. But I tell you one thing." "What's that?" "It sure makes you appreciate something like this when you know it could all go up in a puff of smoke." HOWE"
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Bill Bryson |
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58a7a0d
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In some odd way that you don't understand and can't begin to articulate you feel and acquaintance with it--a familiarity on an unfamiliar level. Somewhere in the deep sediment of your being some long-dormant fragment of primordial memory, some little severed tail of DNA, has twitched or stirred. It is a motion much too faint to be understood or interpreted, but somehow you feel certain that this large, brooding, hypnotic presence has an imp..
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uluru
ayers-rock
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Bill Bryson |
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da8be90
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The one thing he didn't do was discover the comet that bears his name.
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Bill Bryson |
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e752718
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Once he inserted a bodkin - a long needle of the sort used for sewing leather - into his eye socket and rubbed it around 'betwixt my eye and the bone4 as near to [the] backside of my eye as I could' just to see what would happen. What happened, miraculously, was nothing - at least, nothing lasting.
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Bill Bryson |
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10036a9
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It is natural but wrong to visualize the singularity as a kind of pregnant dot hanging in a dark, boundless void. But there is no space, no darkness. The singularity has no "around" around it. There is no space for it to occupy, no place for it to be. We can't even ask how long it has been there--whether it has just lately popped into being, like a good idea, or whether it has been there forever, quietly awaiting the right moment. Time does..
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Bill Bryson |
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52055ef
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If you initialed one dollar per second, you would make $1,000 every seventeen minutes. After 12 days of nonstop effort you would acquire your first $1 million. Thus, it would take you 120 days to accumulate $10 million and 1,200 days-- something over three years--to reach $100 million. After 31.7 years you would become a billionaire, and after almost a thousand years you would be as wealthy as Bill Gates. But not until after 31,709.8 years ..
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Bill Bryson |
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eb77c1d
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In the country inns of a small corner of northern Germany, in the spur of land connecting Schleswig-Holstein to Denmark, you can sometimes hear people talking in what sounds eerily like a lost dialect of English. Occasional snatches of it even make sense, as when they say that the "veather ist cold" or inquire of the time by asking, "What ist de clock?" According to Professor Hubertus Menke, head of the German Department at Kiel University,..
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Bill Bryson |
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fbd44f5
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I hate asking directions. I am always afraid that the person I approach will step back and say, 'You want to go where? The centre of Brussels? Boy, are you lost. This is Lille, you dumb shit,' then stop other passers-by and say, 'You wanna hear something classic? Buddy, tell these people where you think you are,' and that I'll have to push my way through a crowd of people who are falling about and wiping tears of mirth from their eyes. So I..
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Bill Bryson |
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33929aa
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It is easy to overlook the thought that life just is. 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.
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Bill Bryson |
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3892982
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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. Each year, American publishers produced 110 million books, more than 10,000 separate titles, double the number of ten years before. For those who felt daunted by such a welter of..
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Bill Bryson |
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e8d08b1
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Occasionally, he would exclaim over a view or regard with admiration some passing marvel of nature, but mostly to him hiking was a tiring, dirty, pointless slog between distantly spaced comfort zones.
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Bill Bryson |
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c06f891
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What a joy walking is. All the cares of life, all the hopeless, inept fuckwits that God has strewn along the Bill Bryson Highway of Life, suddenly seem far away and harmless, and the world becomes tranquil and welcoming and good. And to walk with old friends multiplies the pleasure a hundredfold.
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Bill Bryson |
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25eeaed
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Perforated eardrums were quite common16, too; but, as Haldane reassuringly noted in one of his essays, 'the drum generally heals up; and if a hole remains in it, although one is somewhat deaf, one can blow tobacco smoke out of the ear in question, which is a social accomplishment.
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Bill Bryson |
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75fa8ec
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Perhaps the most irrational fashion act of all was the male habit for 150 years of wearing wigs. Samuel Pepys, as with so many things, was in the vanguard, noting with some apprehension the purchase of a wig in 1663 when wigs were not yet common. It was such a novelty that he feared people would laugh at him in church; he was greatly relieved, and a little proud, to find that they did not. He also worried, not unreasonably, that the hair of..
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humor
wigs
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Bill Bryson |
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f4de691
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What never fails to astonish at Skara Brae is the sophistication. These were the dwellings of Neolithic people, but the houses had locking doors, a system of drainage and even, it seems, elemental plumbing with slots in the walls to sluice away wastes. The interiors were capacious. The walls, still standing, were up to ten feet high, so they afforded plenty of headroom, and the floors were paved. Each house has built-in stone dressers, stor..
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Bill Bryson |
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8d74193
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H. L. Mencken called it "the one authentic rectum of civilization," but for most people Hollywood was a place of magic. In 1927, the iconic sign on the hillside above the city actually said HOLLYWOODLAND. It had been erected in 1923 to advertise a real estate development and had nothing to do with motion pictures. The letters, each over forty feet high, were in those days also traced out with electric lights. (The LAND was removed in 1949.)..
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Bill Bryson |
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4e621a8
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Linguist say parties in the conversation will tolerate silence for four seconds before interjecting anything, however unrelated.
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speech
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Bill Bryson |
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9823370
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I suppose--I was on a long flight across the Pacific, staring idly out the window at moonlit ocean, when it occurred to me with a certain uncomfortable forcefulness that I didn't know the first thing about the only planet I was ever going to live on.
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Bill Bryson |
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dc2ee1e
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You can't go to East Anglia and not visit Sutton Hoo. Well, you can, obviously, but you shouldn't.
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Bill Bryson |
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970ee47
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As Edward P. Tryon of Columbia University once put it: "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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cac4ab4
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By all the laws of probability proteins shouldn't exist.
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Bill Bryson |
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cd6f919
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Scheele independently discovered eight elements--chlorine, fluorine, manganese, barium, molybdenum, tungsten, nitrogen, and oxygen--but received credit for none of them in his lifetime. He had an unfortunate habit of tasting every substance he worked with, as a way of familiarizing himself with its properties, and eventually the practice caught up with him.
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Bill Bryson |
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7970764
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The reason for this is that the universe bends, in a way we can't adequately imagine, in conformance with Einstein's theory of relativity (which we will get to in due course). For the moment it is enough to know that we are not adrift in some large, ever-expanding bubble. Rather, space curves, in a way that allows it to be boundless but finite. Space cannot even properly be said to be expanding because, as the physicist and Nobel laureate S..
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Bill Bryson |
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6dbf1b4
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Nathaniel Hawthorne, who was at the time American consul in Liverpool, provided a preface, then almost instantly wished he hadn't, for the book was universally regarded by reviewers as preposterous hokum. Hawthorne under questioning admitted that he hadn't actually read it. "This shall be the last of my benevolent follies, and I will never be kind to anybody again as long as [I] live," he vowed in a letter to a friend."
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Bill Bryson |
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b8c936b
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What on earth would I do if four bears came into my camp? Why, I would die, of course. Literally shit myself lifeless. I would blow my sphincter out my backside like one of those unrolling paper streamers you get at children's parties--I daresay it would even give a merry toot--and bleed to a messy death in my sleeping bag.
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Bill Bryson |
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ef69186
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I had a hangover you could sell to science,
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Bill Bryson |
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7732ccc
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Although there was no reliable way of dating periods, there was no shortage of people willing to try. The most well known early attempt30 was made in 1650, when Archbishop James Ussher of the Church of Ireland made a careful study of the Bible and other historical sources and concluded, in a hefty tome called Annals of the Old Testament, that the Earth had been created at midday on 23 October 4004 BC, an assertion that has amused historians..
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Bill Bryson |
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a6613ea
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What made this particularly interesting is that John Howard is by far the dullest man in Australia. Imagine a very committed funeral home director - someone whose burning ambition from the age of eleven was to be a funeral home director, whose proudest achievement in adulthood was to be elected president of the Queanbeyan and District Funeral Home Directors' Association - then halve his personality and halve it again, and you have pretty we..
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Bill Bryson |
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a4c20ac
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In fact, there is no point in trying to hide from your bacteria, for they are on and around you always, in numbers you can't conceive. If you are in good health and averagely diligent about hygiene, you will have a herd of about one trillion bacteria grazing on your fleshy plains--about a hundred thousand of them on every square centimeter of skin. They are there to dine off the ten billion or so flakes of skin you shed every day, plus all ..
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Bill Bryson |
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ed3ffe6
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The most splendid thing about the Amish is the names they give their towns. Everywhere else in America towns are named either after the first white person to get there or the last Indian to leave. But the Amish obviously gave the matter of town names some thought and graced their communities with intriguing, not to say provocative, appellations: Blue Ball, Bird in Hand, and Intercourse, to name but three. Intercourse makes a good living by ..
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Bill Bryson |
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2a58b72
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Yet it would be nearly impossible to overstate Lyell's influence. The Principles of Geology went through twelve editions in his lifetime and contained notions that shaped geological thinking far into the twentieth century. Darwin took a first edition with him on the Beagle voyage and wrote afterwards that 'the great merit of the Principles was that it altered the whole tone of one's mind, and therefore that, when seeing a thing never seen b..
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Bill Bryson |
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27cd436
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Looking for a supernova, therefore, was a little like standing on the observation platform of the Empire State Building with a telescope and searching windows around Manhattan in the hope of finding, let us say, someone lighting a twenty-first birthday cake.
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science
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Bill Bryson |
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c431910
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The author reveals a cultural change that took place when clergy were paid based on a tax on the land's value rather than what it produced. This meant that, while parishioners could suffer through a terrible year, clergy would always have a comfortable one.
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suffering
detachment
ministry
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Bill Bryson |
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28e4fea
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Every atom you possess has almost certainly passed through several stars and been part of millions of organisms on its way to becoming you. We are each so atomically numerous and so vigorously recycled at death that a significant number of our atoms--up to a billion for each of us, it has been suggested--probably once belonged to Shakespeare. A billion more each came from Buddha and Genghis Khan and Beethoven, and any other historical figur..
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Bill Bryson |