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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| fa87abd | Reverence for parents" stands written among the three laws of most revered righteousness. | Aeschylus | ||
| e4c0ad5 | journal Science in 1980 contending that women are genetically inferior at mathematics. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 9e9e078 | Innumerable twinkling of the waves of the sea. | Aeschylus | ||
| bee655e | Then he put on The harness of Necessity. | Aeschylus | ||
| 2a65a09 | Least said is soonest mended. | Aeschylus | ||
| 973f591 | The Dunning-Kruger Effect is essentially being too stupid to appreciate how stupid you are. | Bill Bryson | ||
| abfcd0f | Narratives about certain experiences are somehow legitimized when mediated through a man's perspective. | Roxane Gay | ||
| de2c3b4 | She [Helen] brought to Ilium her dowry, destruction. | Aeschylus | ||
| aced703 | Dangerous is a people's voice charged with wrath. | Aeschylus | ||
| a9bb88d | I thought, it's a shame that we have to live, but it's a tragedy that we get to live only one life, because if I'd had two lives, I would have spent one of them with her. | Jonathan Safran Foer | ||
| 11993ea | It is curious to reflect that we have computers that can effortlessly compute pi to 5,000 places and yet cannot be made to understand that there is a difference between time flies like an arrow and fruit flies like a banana or that in the English-speaking world to make up a story, to make up one's face, and to make up after a fight are all quite separate things. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 3c87ca0 | Flies are of course always irksome, but the Australian variety distinguishes itself with its very particular persistence. If an Australian fly wants to be up your nose or in your ear, there is no discouraging him. Flick at him as you will and each time he will jump out of range and come straight back. It is simply not possible to deter him. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 9402762 | Oh, you can trust the studies well enough, generally speaking. What you can't trust are the sweeping conclusions that people often attach to them. | Bill Bryson | ||
| c08a13d | Sir Thomas More came up with absurdity, acceptance, exact, explain, and exaggerate. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 56b0eaf | If you count proper nouns, the word in English with the most varied spellings is air with a remarkable thirty-eight: Aire, ayr, heir, e'er, ere, and so on. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 7588f80 | We have been gulled by the ease of air travel and other forms of communication into thinking that the world is not all that big, but at ground level, where researchers must work, it is actually enormous. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 6aa640e | It is one of the felicities of English that we can take pieces of words from all over and fuse them into new constructions--like trusteeship, which consists of a Nordic stem (trust), combined with a French affix (ee), married to an Old English root (ship). Other languages cannot do this. We should be proud of ourselves for our ingenuity and yet even now authorities commonly attack almost any new construction as ugly or barbaric. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 55a373e | No doubt the reason hopefully is not allowed is that somebody at The New York Times once had a boss who wouldn't allow it because his professor had forbidden it, because his father thought it was ugly and inelegant, because he had been told so by his uncle who was a man of great learning . . . and so on. | Bill Bryson | ||
| f46e750 | An American going into a London department store with a shopping list consisting of vest, knickers, suspenders, jumper, and pants would in each instance be given something dramatically different from what he expected. (To wit, a British vest is an American undershirt. Our vest is their waistcoat. Their knickers are our panties. To them a jumper is a sweater, while what we call a jumper is to them a pinafore dress. Our suspenders are their b.. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 63eb6ca | I can think of two very good reasons for not splitting an infinitive. 1. Because you feel that the rules of English ought to conform to the grammatical precepts of a language that died a thousand years ago. 2. Because you wish to cling to a pointless affectation of usage that is without the support of any recognized authority of the last 200 years, even at the cost of composing sentences that are ambiguous, inelegant, and patently contorted.. | Bill Bryson | ||
| ad93f28 | meat was any food (the sense is preserved in "meat and drink" and in the English food mincemeat, which contains various fruits but no meat in the sense that we now use it)." | Bill Bryson | ||
| 8c93221 | 85 percent of the 30,000 Anglo-Saxon words died out under the influence of the Danes and Normans. That means that only about 4,500 Old English words survived--about 1 percent of the total number of words in the Oxford English Dictionary. And yet those surviving words are among the most fundamental words in English: man, wife, child, brother, sister, live, fight, love, drink, sleep, eat, house, and so on. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 197b077 | It is a cherishable irony that a language that succeeded almost by stealth, treated for centuries as the inadequate and second-rate tongue of peasants, should one day become the most important and successful language in the world. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 7033a60 | Language is more fashion than science | language linguistics | Bill Bryson | |
| 20f3483 | The white people never looked at the Aborigines, and the Aborigines never looked at the white people. The two races seemed to inhabit separate but parallel universes. I felt as if I was the only person who could see both groups at once. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 7d6d408 | In 1606, a Spanish mariner named Luis Vaez de Torres sailed across the Pacific from South America and straight into the narrow channel (now called the Torres Strait) that separates Australia from New Guinea without having the faintest idea that he had just done the nautical equivalent of threading a needle. | Bill Bryson | ||
| ba5d441 | Sumatra, | Bill Bryson | ||
| 9c243ca | Thirty-six years later the Dutchman Abel Tasman was sent to look for the fabled South Land and managed to sail 2,000 miles along the underside of Australia without detecting that a substantial land mass lay just over the left-hand horizon. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 97170e9 | Trinil skullcap. | Bill Bryson | ||
| d44ef18 | They knew there was something there - possibly a biggish island like New Guinea, possibly a mass of smaller islands like the East Indies - and they called this amorphous entity New Holland, but none equated it with the long-sought southern continent. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 0566ef0 | I think the slain care little if they sleep or rise again. | Aeschylus | ||
| 65993cf | About 4.6 billion years ago, a great swirl of gas and dust some 24 billion kilometres across accumulated in space where we are now and began to aggregate. Virtually all of it - 99.9 per cent of the mass of the solar system21 - went to make the Sun. Out of the floating material that was left over, two microscopic grains floated close enough together to be joined by electrostatic forces. This was the moment of conception for our planet. All o.. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 5e690e5 | It really doesn't pay to go back and look again at the things that once delighted you, because it's unlikely they will delight you now. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 13584c0 | Years ago, when my wife and I were dating, she took me on a day trip to the seaside at Brighton. It was my first exposure to the British at play in a marine environment. It was a fairly warm day--I remember the sun came out for whole moments at a time--and large numbers of people were in the sea. They were shrieking with what I took to be pleasure, but now realize was agony. Naively, I pulled off my T-shirt and sprinted into the water. It w.. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 4120040 | Fears have been raised that in their enthusiasm scientists might inadvertently create a black hole or even something called "strange quarks," which could, theoretically, interact with other subatomic particles and propagate uncontrollably. If you are reading this, that hasn't happened." | Bill Bryson | ||
| fd4b285 | Clearly there was a need for some inspired and clever experimentation, and happily the age produced a young person with the diligence and aptitude to undertake it. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 6bf3548 | Consider just one of those stories that did make it into the New York Times in 1997, though buried away in the odd-sock drawer of Section C. 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.. | Bill Bryson | ||
| ea6cdf3 | All Australians are required by law to vote in federal elections, including residents of the Northern Territory. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 295878c | They simply exist," Attenborough adds, "testifying to the moving fact that life even at its simplest level occurs, apparently, just for its own sake." | Bill Bryson | ||
| 056b2bb | shibboleth. People in Northern Ireland are naturally | Bill Bryson | ||
| ae875af | though I didn't believe everything I learned, it was important to know such ideas, such truths, were out there. | Roxane Gay | ||
| bb387f8 | My favourite animal disappearance story, however, harks back to a somewhat earlier age. It concerns a nineteenth-century naturalist named Gerard Krefft, who in 1857 caught two very rare pig-footed bandicoots. Unfortunately for science and for the bandicoots, Krefft soon afterwards grew hungry and ate them. They were, as far as anyone can tell, the last of the species. Certainly none has been seen since. Krefft, incidentally, was later appoi.. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 448dfa4 | A mesma ignorancia predominou em relacao a muitas criaturas maiores, inclusive um dos mais importantes e menos compreendidos de todos os animais que por vezes se encontram nas casas modernas: o morcego. Quase ninguem gosta dos morcegos, o que e lamentavel, porque eles fazem muito mais bem do que mal. Comem grandes quantidades de insetos, beneficiando as plantacoes e o ser humano. O morcego marrom, a especie mais comum nos Estados Unidos, co.. | Bill Bryson | ||
| dac5758 | In 1956, while passing through customs at Sydney Airport, he was found to be carrying a large and diversified collection of pornographic material, and he was invited to take his sordid continental habits elsewhere. Thus, by one of life's small ironies, he was unable to enjoy, as it were, his own finest erection. | Bill Bryson |