1
2
3
5
8
12
20
33
52
83
133
213
340
543
867
1384
2208
3346
3522
5443
5619
6757
7241
7242
7243
7244
7245
7581
8098
8422
8625
8752
8832
8882
8913
8932
8945
8953
8957
8960
8962
8963
8964
8965
▲
▼
| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| df88ef7 | Tokyo: "When a passenger of the foot heave in sight, tootle the horn. Trumpet at him melodiously at first, but if he still obstacles your passage, then tootle him with vigor." | Bill Bryson | ||
| 696df84 | Italy: "Besmear a backing pan, previously buttered with a good tomato sauce, and, after, dispose the cannelloni, lightly distanced between them in a only couch." | Bill Bryson | ||
| 096966d | fly signifies an annoying insect, a means of travel, and a critical part of a gentleman's apparel is clearly asking to be mangled. | Bill Bryson | ||
| c327a22 | more students of English in China than there are people in the United States. | Bill Bryson | ||
| c9a477e | You look at the modern humans that a lot of us have slept with and it is hardly a surprise if a Neanderthal maiden or two might have twinkled by the campfire light. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 0af93b1 | Originally, geological history was divided into four spans of time: primary, secondary, tertiary and quaternary. | Bill Bryson | ||
| fa5735a | among them Pleistocene ("most recent"), Pliocene ("more recent"), Miocene ("moderately recent") and the rather endearingly vague Oligocene ("but a little recent")." | Bill Bryson | ||
| 3111a37 | Nowadays, and speaking very generally, geological time is divided first into four great chunks known as eras: Precambrian, Palaeozoic (from the Greek meaning "old life"), Mesozoic ("middle life") and Cenozoic ("recent life"). These four eras are further divided into anywhere from a dozen to twenty subgroups," | Bill Bryson | ||
| 64bd7fd | Moreover, all this applies only to units of time. Rocks are divided into quite separate units known as systems, series and stages. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 24554ea | 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 | Bill Bryson | ||
| 6593095 | Norfolk specializes in odd pronunciations. Hautbois is hobbiss, Wymondham is windum, Costessey is cozzy, Postwick is pozzik. People often ask why that is. I'm not sure, but I think it is just something that happens when you sleep with close relatives. | Bill Bryson | ||
| a04ec17 | Lord Kelvin, who throughout his career produced revolutionary scientific theories and was arguably the first scientist to become wealthy by patenting his work. Despite his undoubted brilliance, he was chronically, and indeed dismally, unable to determine the age of the | Bill Bryson | ||
| d9e2a2f | the Maoris of New Zealand have thirty-five words for dung (don't ask me why). | Bill Bryson | ||
| cd2eeea | Charles Darwin announced that the geological processes that created the Weald, an area of southern England stretching across Kent, Surrey and Sussex, had taken, by his calculations, 306, 662, 400 years to complete. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 2bbe4d9 | Do you know," he said, "it's twenty years since you wrote Notes from a Small Island?" (This was my first book about Britain. It did awfully well there.) "Twenty years?" I replied, amazed at how much past one can accumulate without any effort at all." | Bill Bryson | ||
| 22ecc49 | There Kelvin proved himself such a prodigy that he was admitted to Glasgow University at the exceedingly tender age of ten. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 4eccfaa | Wirtschaftstreuhandgesellschaft (business trust company), | Bill Bryson | ||
| e29f3a6 | Nether Hambleton and Middle Hambleton | Bill Bryson | ||
| 4ca636d | Hitler and Mussolini even went so far as to persecute Esperanto speakers. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 1b9ed15 | The great Caltech physicist Richard Feynman once observed that if you had to reduce scientific history to one important statement it would be: "All things are made of atoms." | Bill Bryson | ||
| a98701b | The basic working arrangement of atoms is the molecule (from the Latin for "little mass")." | Bill Bryson | ||
| 45e8f79 | If there is one thing certain about English pronunciation it is that there is almost nothing certain about it. No other language in the world has more words spelled the same way and yet pronounced differently. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 7d8e460 |
In breve, Shakespeare non e tanto una figura storica, quanto un'ossessione accademica. Una rapida occhiata agli indici delle molte riviste dedicate a lui e alla sua epoca disvela risolute indagini quali: < |
Bill Bryson | ||
| 4f57c77 |
La popolazione era presa costantemente d'assedio dalla tubercolosi, dal morbillo, dal rachitismo, dallo scorbuto, da due tipi di vaiolo (confluente ed emorragico), dalla scrofola, dalla dissenteria e da un vasto, amorfo assortimento di flussi e febbri (febbre terzana, febbre quartana, febbre puerperale, febbre navale, febbre quotidiana, febbre a macchie) cosi come di < |
Bill Bryson | ||
| 28eaac0 |
La sua mente e la sua mano andavano di pari passo>> scrissero [John Eminges e Henri Condell] nell'introduzione all'in-folio, < |
Bill Bryson | ||
| ef4d820 | Lots of people leave Pennsylvania limping and bruised. The state also has what are reputed to be the meanest rattlesnakes anywhere along the trail, and the most unreliable water sources, particularly in high summer. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 32e54f0 | Crowding in many London districts was almost unimaginable. In St. Giles, the worst of London's rookeries--scene of William Hogarth's famous engraving Gin Lane--fifty-four thousand people crowded into just a few streets. By one count, eleven hundred people lived in twenty-seven houses along one alley; that is more than forty people per dwelling. In Spitalfields, farther east, inspectors found sixty-three people living in a single house. The .. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 609264e | My father once owned a McGregor Glen Plaid Visa-Versa Reversible Jacket and got real pleasure from showing people, including total strangers, how you could turn it inside out and have a second, bonus jacket. "That's why it's called Visa-Versa," he would explain, as if revealing one of the secrets of the universe." | Bill Bryson | ||
| c7c524b | there. I had thought we would have | Bill Bryson | ||
| 6aa54f0 | Shy is when you turn your head away from something you want. Shame is when you turn your head away from something you do not want. | Jonathan safran foer | ||
| fefa9a2 | You only get to keep what you refuse to let go of | moving-on-and-letting-go | Jonathan Safran Foer | |
| edb7657 | 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. That's all there is to it. Without doubt, the moose is the most improbable, endearingly hopeless creature ever to live in the wilds. Every bit of it--its spindly legs, its chronically puzzled expression, its comical oven-mitt antlers--looks like some droll evolutionary joke. It is wondrously ungainly: it runs as .. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 8cd56db | Bill Tilden was the greatest--and most improbably great--tennis player of the age. | Bill Bryson | ||
| e0acfcb | Bundesbahnangestelltenwitwe (a widow of a federal railway employee), | Bill Bryson | ||
| cbf7f79 | Kriegsgefangenenentschadigungsgesetz (a law pertaining to war reparations), | Bill Bryson | ||
| a152b2c | Cressbrook Mill was operated mostly by orphans who were treated worse than abysmally. | Bill Bryson | ||
| af3c39c | I longed for artificial bacon bits, melted cheese in a shade of yellow unknown to nature, and creamy chocolate fillings, sometimes all in the same product. I wanted food that squirts when you bite into it or plops onto your shirt front in such gross quantities that you have to rise very, very carefully from the table and sort of limbo over to the sink to clean yourself up. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 9dbbd6f | the world hate you? Most of them you will never even meet, and yet they really don't like you at all. All the people who write software at Microsoft hate you, and so do most of the people who answer phones at Expedia. The people at TripAdvisor would hate you, too, if they weren't so fucking stupid. Almost all frontline hotel employees detest you, as do airline employees without exception. All the people who have ever worked for British Tele.. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 546a39f | Jefferson, incidentally, was also a great adventurer with foods. Among his many other accomplishments, he was the first person in America to slice potatoes lengthwise and fry them. So as well as being the author of the Declaration of Independence, he was also the father of the American French fry. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 9c9df70 | Even worse was the fate of an eighteenth-century Chateau Margaux reputed to have once been owned by Thomas Jefferson and valued, very precisely, at $519,750. While showing off his acquisition at a New York restaurant in 1989, William Sokolin, a wine merchant, accidentally knocked the bottle against the side of a serving cart and it broke, in an instant converting the world's most expensive bottle of wine into the world's most expensive carp.. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 7c20057 | It is an unnatural business to find yourself in a strange place with an underutilized brain and no particular reason for being there, and eventually it makes you go a little crazy. --BILL BRYSON | Rob Lilwall | ||
| 6187671 | Piu che per qualsiasi altro scrittore, in Shakespeare le parole sono separate dalla vita. Era un uomo cosi bravo a nascondere cio che provava che non possiamo nemmeno essere sicuri che provasse qualcosa. Sappiamo che usava le parole con enorme efficacia, e possiamo ragionevolmente supporre che avesse dei sentimenti. Quello che non sappiamo, e che possiamo soltanto tirare a indovinare, e dove le due cose si intersecavano. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 94718b2 | La casa natale di Shakespeare, se non altro, sfuggi destino preparatogli dall'impresario P.T. Barnum, che negli anni Quaranta dell'Ottocento ebbe l'idea di spedirla negli Stati Uniti, montarla su ruote e mandarla in perpetua tournee per il Paese - prospettiva talmente allarmante che in Gran Bretagna ci si affretto a raccogliere fondi per salvarla e trasformarla in museo e santuario. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 84f6c82 | in the words of Carl Sagan. | Bill Bryson |