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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 4bd7059 | An is indisputably correct before just four words beginning with 'h': hour, honest, honour and heir. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 61f2ab4 | Unluckier still was Guillaume Le Gentil, whose experiences are wonderfully summarized by Timothy Ferris in Coming of Age in the Milky Way. Le Gentil set off from France a year ahead of time to observe the transit from India, but various setbacks left him still at sea on the day of the transit--just about the worst place to be since steady measurements were impossible on a pitching ship. Undaunted, Le Gentil continued on to India to await th.. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 779c25e | amoral, immoral. Amoral describes matters in which questions of morality do not arise or are disregarded; immoral applies to things that are evil. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 9ffcc65 | The parking lot was almost empty, except for an old bus from which a load of senior citizens were disembarking. The bus was from the Calvary Baptist Church in someplace like Firecracker, Georgia, or Bareassed, Alabama. The old people were noisy and excited, like schoolchildren, and pushed in front of me at the ticket booth, little realizing that I wouldn't hesitate to give an old person a shove, especially a Baptist. Why is it, I wondered, .. | Bill Bryson | ||
| fd35f9d | Speakers from the Mediterranean region, for instance, like to put their faces very close, relatively speaking, to those they are addressing. A common scene when people from southern Europe and northern Europe are conversing, as at a cocktail party, is for the latter to spend the entire conversation stealthily retreating, to try to gain some space, and for the former to keep advancing to close the gap. Neither speaker may even be aware of it.. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 6bb51a9 | The transit of Venus of 1769 finally allowed us to determine the distance from the Earth to the Sun: 149.59 million kilometres. A | Bill Bryson | ||
| 4705413 | Only one thing is certain: we live on a knife edge. In | Bill Bryson | ||
| d04080f | Distance changes utterly when you take the world on foot. A mile becomes a long way, two miles literally considerable, ten miles whopping, fifty miles at the very limits of conception. | walking | Bill Bryson | |
| f31faf0 | Every second a hundred bolts of lightning streak to Earth across the globe as the electric charges that build up within storm clouds are attracted by the positively charged ground. Earth experiences about 40,000 thunderstorms a day. | Bill Bryson | ||
| e7bb672 | 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. Almost any name will do so long as it is at least faintly absurd, unconnected with the name of the owner, and entirely lacking in any suggestion of drinking, conversing, and enjoying oneself. At a minimum the name should puzzle foreigners--this is a basic requirement of most British institutions--and ideally .. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 3def0c4 | So the first dinosaur bone ever found was also the first to be lost. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 67b529c | Somewhere in all this, it was thought, there also resided a mysterious elan vital, the force that brought inanimate objects to life. No-one knew where this ethereal essence lay, but two things seemed probable: that you could enliven it with a jolt of electricity (a notion Mary Shelley exploited to full effect in her novel Frankenstein); and that it existed in some substances but not others, which is why we ended up with two branches of chem.. | Bill Bryson | ||
| eaaafca | To say that Windermere is popular with boaters is to flirt recklessly with understatement. | Bill Bryson | ||
| c4af588 | disturb, perturb. They can often be used interchangeably, but generally the first is better applied to physical agitation, the second to mental agitation. | Bill Bryson | ||
| ba374e3 | avenge, revenge. Generally, avenge indicates the settling of a score or the redressing of an injustice. It is more dispassionate than revenge, which indicates retaliation taken largely for the sake of personal satisfaction. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 1cd4c3f | Travelling faster than a bullet, an incoming meteor would be moving much too swiftly to be seen, much less to provoke alarm. (Credit | Bill Bryson | ||
| ad357e1 | Moreover, wool wasn't sheared in the early days, but painfully plucked. It is little wonder that sheep are such skittish animals when humans are around. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 5968760 | Goldilocks effect"--that everything is just right. (For the record, these three possible universes are known respectively as closed, open and flat.) Now," | Bill Bryson | ||
| 4d0dce8 | It's a funny thing because Britain was in a terrible state in those days. It limped from crisis to crisis. It was known as the Sick Man of Europe. It was in every way poorer than now. Yet there were flower beds in 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 s.. | Bill Bryson | ||
| f3bcc3d | Today it takes the average citizen of Tanzania almost a year to produce the same volume of carbon emissions as is effortlessly generated every two and a half days by a European, or every twenty-eight hours by an American. We are, in short, able to live as we do because we use resources at hundreds of times the rate of most of the planet's other citizens. Once day - and don't expect it to be a distant day - many of those six billion or so le.. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 6099888 | further research has shown that there is or may well be a bacterial component in all kinds of other disorders46 - heart disease, asthma, arthritis, multiple sclerosis, several types of mental disorders, many cancers, even, it has been suggested (in Science no less), obesity. | Bill Bryson | ||
| e1bea00 | If we were randomly inserted into the universe," Sagan wrote, "the chances that you would be on or near a planet would be less than one in a billion trillion trillion." | Bill Bryson | ||
| fc60007 | Glance at the night sky and what you see is history and lots of it--not the stars as they are now but as they were when their light left them. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 72b7ade | growth. Often used contrarily by economists and those who write about them: 'It now looks as if growth will remain stagnant until spring' (Observer); '... with the economy moving into a negative growth phase' (The Times). Growth obviously indicates expansion. If a thing is shrinking or standing still, growth simply isn't the word for it. | Bill Bryson | ||
| f21d3fa | 22 million tonnes of such unwanted fish are dumped back in the sea each year, mostly in the form of corpses. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 38232d4 | We live in a world that doesn't altogether seem to want us here. | Bill Bryson | ||
| f3d81e9 | Charles Darwin, driven to desperation by a mysterious lifelong malady that left him chronically lethargic, routinely draped himself with electrified zinc chains, doused his body with vinegar, and glumly underwent hours of pointless tingling in the hope that it would effect some improvement. It never did. The | Bill Bryson | ||
| 0f3d397 | blueprint as a metaphor for a design or plan is much overworked. If the temptation to use it is irresistible, at least remember that a blueprint is a completed plan, not a preliminary one. | Bill Bryson | ||
| e2af2a5 | needless to say is a harmless enough expression, but it often draws attention to the fact that you really didn't need to say it. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 134e632 | Sometimes these differences in meaning take on a kind of bewildering circularity. A tramp in Britain is a bum in America, while a bum in Britain is a fanny in America, while a fanny in Britain is--well, we've covered that. To a foreigner it must seem sometimes as if we are being intentionally contrary. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 112825e | It is a curious feature of our existence that we come from a planet that is very good at promoting life but even better at extinguishing it. The | Bill Bryson | ||
| d155586 | Self-Management If you can read just one book on motivation--yours and others: Dan Pink, Drive If you can read just one book on building new habits: Charles Duhigg, The Power of Habit If you can read just one book on harnessing neuroscience for personal change: Dan Siegel, Mindsight If you can read just one book on deep personal change: Lisa Lahey and Bob Kegan, Immunity to Change If you can read just one book on resilience: Seth Godin, The.. | Michael Bungay Stanier | ||
| a4f1158 | Na zlomecek vecnosti obema lodim nic nebranilo ve volne strelbe na protivnika a v tom okamziku dva ruzne pocitace odstartovaly sve palebne plany. Zadny lidsky smysl nedokazal postrehnout, co se odehralo potom; zadny lidsky mozek by si to neumel prebrat. Vzajemna vzdalenost cinila dvacet tisic kilometru a rizene strely, lasery a grasery dstily zkazu pres tu miniaturni propast vakua jako rozzureni demoni. Ahmed zavravoral, kdyz jeho bocnim st.. | David Weber | ||
| d6331c9 | The marvelous intricacy of the rules they'd established, the processes they'd set into motion, the miracles of subtlety and beauty, were enough to make anyone drunk with admiration and awe, and how could God, having given man the ability to reason and understand, not want him to explore all the beautiful marvels with which He'd surrounded him? She | David Weber | ||
| bd2dd27 | sweeping, simplistic solutions to complicated problems are much more appealing than tackling the real thought that might actually solve them. | David Weber | ||
| 0669f15 | Shut not your minds to the new because the chains of the past bind you tight, for it is those who cling most desperately to the old who will turn you from the new way and lead you once more in to the paths of the unclean | David Weber | ||
| 600bea2 | one of the first signs of a self-destructing aboriginal culture always seems to be an increase in the use of drugs and intoxicants, | David Weber | ||
| 97d6992 | But every time I told myself one lie, I had to tell another to justify the ones that came before it. | David Weber | ||
| 0594adb | Shergahn and friend lay like poleaxed steers, and the Daranfelian's greasy hair was thick with potatoes, carrots, gravy, and chunks of beef. His companion had less stew in his hair, but an equally large lump was rising fast, and Brandark flipped his improvised club into the air, caught it in proper dipping position, and filled it once more from the pot without even glancing at them. He raised the ladle to his nose, inhaled deeply, and glanc.. | bully defeat delicious food funny good humor humorous laughter lump shame sleep steer stew triumph yummy | David Weber | |
| 3409489 | This, she realized suddenly, was probably the best squadron command she would ever have--unless, | David Weber | ||
| bc6a019 | That thought let her banish the grin at last, because if independent command was what every good officer craved, a captain all alone in the big dark had no one to appeal to. No one to take the credit or share the blame, for she was all alone, the final arbiter of her ship's fate and the direct, personal representative of her queen and kingdom, and if she failed that trust no power in the galaxy could save her. | David Weber | ||
| 5ca8374 | Hot, bright heat filled him like some ecstatic poison, and Hartan's pony shied in terror as a wordless howl burst from his throat. His dripping ears were flat to his skull, fire crackled in his brown eyes, his huge sword blurred in a whirring figure eight before him, and the brigand running at him gawked in sudden panic. The raider's feet skidded in mud as he tried to brake, but it was far too late. He was face-to-face with the worst nightm.. | brigand ecstasy ecstatic fear fight fire gawk heat howl hradani nightmare panic poison skirmish steel sword terror thief | David Weber | |
| a9c6cfe | The wise monarch listens to his generals in matters of war, to his ministers in matters of state, and to his people in matters of morality." "Ha!" | David Weber | ||
| 1ab3e06 | The splendor of that moment, its transcendent glory and aliveness, haunted him. He could thrust it aside by day, but it poisoned his dreams by night, calling to him and pleading with him to unlock the chains he'd bound about it. | aliveness berserker chain chains desire dreams glory haunt haunted haunting moment nightmare pleading rage splendor unlock yearn | David Weber |