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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 7d22c07 | I would sooner have bowel surgery in the woods with a stick. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 0b92da2 | The woods were full of peril -- rattlesnakes and water moccasins and nests of copperheads; bobcats, bears, coyotes, wolves, and wild boar; loony hillbillies destabilized by gross quantities of impure corn liquor and generations of profoundly unbiblical sex; rabies-crazed skunks, raccoons, and squirrels; merciless fire ants and ravening blackfly; poison ivy, poison sumac, poisonoak, and poison salamanders; even a scattering of moose lethally.. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 58b9d51 | The coffee served in the coffeehouses wasn't necessarily very good coffee. Because of the way coffee was taxed in Britain (by the gallon), the practice was to brew it in large batches, store it cold in barrels, and reheat it a little at a time for serving. So coffee's appeal in Britain had less to do with being a quality beverage than with being a social lubricant. People went to coffeehouses to meet people of shared interests, gossip, read.. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 90e7b6c | properispomenon. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 1ae6cf8 | Formerly there were two ways. One was to take the ferry. This is the way I came on my first visit, and I have to say it was strange. All the passengers - and there weren't many - went below and lay down on whatever horizontal surface they could find. Many covered their faces with their coats, as if hiding. Just after we left port, the snack bar closed. All this seemed a little odd, and then we hit the open sea and we began to roll and pitch.. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 0bda5af | Was Hamlet a Man or a Woman?" and others of similarly inventive cast." -- | Bill Bryson | ||
| 4a11220 | WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE WAS BORN into a world that was short of people and struggled to keep those it had. In 1564 England had a population of between three million and five million--much less than three hundred years earlier, when plague began to take a continuous, heavy | Bill Bryson | ||
| b267878 | The problem was that I knew nothing like as much as I ought to know to work safely as a journalist in Britain, and I lived in constant fear that my employers would discover the full extent of my ignorance and send me back to Iowa. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 1ef2207 | an obligatory manifestation of matter, bound to arise wherever conditions are appropriate. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 1b8df9e | It's a strange thing because nobody can say exactly where the Scottish Highlands begin and end, but there comes a moment when the world fills with clean, sparkling air and the mountains take on a kind of purply glory and you know you are there. That's what I was looking | Bill Bryson | ||
| 5655098 | the only English-language publication on offer was the weekend edition of USA Today, a publication that always puts me in mind of a newspaper we used to get in grade school called My Weekly Reader. I am amazed enough that they can find buyers for USA Today in the U.S.A., but the possibility that anyone would ever present himself at the station kiosk in Buchs, Switzerland, and ask for it seemed to me to set a serious challenge to the laws of.. | Bill Bryson | ||
| cd4f472 | It is an extraordinary fact but a true one that there are thousands of men in Britain who will never need Viagra as long as steam trains are in operation. | Bill Bryson | ||
| c639a82 | the favourite activity is drinking a lot of beer and the second is throwing it up again) | Bill Bryson | ||
| 4a9dbc1 | am not at all sure how we should tackle such a crisis, but on the basis of what we know so far, I would suggest, as a start, quarantining Texas. I | Bill Bryson | ||
| 63abb56 | Seven | Bill Bryson | ||
| e415fe1 | With their radio telescopes they can capture wisps of radiation so preposterously faint that the total amount of energy collected from outside the solar system by all of them | Bill Bryson | ||
| ddefc0e | headed instead across the field to the Magna Carta memorial, a little open-air rotunda erected in 1957 by the American Bar Association and memorable today as the only decent thing ever done by lawyers. | Bill Bryson | ||
| c248a39 | The Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., contains about seven thousand works on Shakespeare--twenty years' worth of reading if read at the rate of one a day--and, as this volume slimly attests, the number keeps growing. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 4f39910 | Whatever was on your shopping list--linseed oil, two-inch masonry nails, coal scuttle, small can of Brasso metal polish--Mr. Morley had it. I am sure if you said to him, "I need 125 yards of razor wire, a ship's anchor, and a dominatrix outfit in a size eight," he would find them for you after rooting around for a few minutes among bird feeders and bags of bone meal. Mr." | Bill Bryson | ||
| c82ae57 | You can't have a more civilized community than one in which hospital staff play cricket at the end of a summer's day and lunatics can wander and mingle without exciting comment or alarm. It was wonderful, possibly unsurpassable. It really was. That was the Britain I came to. I wish it could be that place again. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 365ef34 | I took off my boot and sock and examined my ankle, expecting--and indeed, in that perverse manner of the injured male, rather hoping--to find some splintered bone straining at the skin like a tent pole, making everyone who saw it queasy. But the ankle was just faintly bluish and tender and very slightly swollen, and I realized that once more in my life I had merely achieved acute pain and not the sort of grotesque injury that would lead to .. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 531ea13 | I might not be the first person in history to touch both ends of the Bryson Line, but I was certainly the first to do it and know he had done it. So | Bill Bryson | ||
| c255f02 | What an interesting and exciting thought. We may be only one of millions of advanced civilizations. Unfortunately, space being spacious, the average distance between any two of these civilizations is reckoned to be at least two hundred light-years, which is a great deal more than merely saying it makes it sound. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 2e819e8 | Goodness knows what the world is coming to when park rangers carry service revolvers. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 2b17dd3 | Men would fight well for their pay, but they would die for an aspiration. | Dorothy Dunnett | ||
| 7741fbc | So you've nearly done it, huh?" I said, a trifle inanely but just trying to make conversation. "Yes" said the girl. She said it slowly, as two syllables, as if it hadn't previously occurred to her. There was something serenely mindless in her manner. "Did you ever feel like giving up?" The girl thought for a moment. "No," she said simply. "Really?" I found this amazing. "Did you never think, 'Jeez, this is too much. I don't know that I wan.. | Bill Bryson | ||
| cfc8fb5 | We were received with warmth and bustling kindliness by the proprietor....She called us "you boys" and acted as if she had been expecting us for days, possibly years. "Goodness me, just look at you boys!" she clucked in astonishment and delight. "You look as if you've been wrestling bears!" I suppose we must have looked a sight. Katz was liberally covered in blood from his fraught stumble through the woods, and there was tiredness all over .. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 8d1b1bb | In 1986, The Economist assembled a list of English terms that had become more or less universal. They were: airport, passport, hotel, telephone, bar, soda, cigarette, sport, golf, tennis, stop, O.K., weekend, jeans, know-how, sex appeal, and no problem. | Bill Bryson | ||
| c830ede | To make matters worse, somebody in our group was making the most dreadful silent farts. Fortunately, it was me, so I wasn't nearly as bothered as the others. | Bill Bryson | ||
| ef39237 | Partly for this reason Sir Thomas Gresham had recently built the Royal Exchange, the most fabulous commercial building of its day. (Gresham is traditionally associated with Gresham's law--that bad money drives out good--which he may or may not actually have formulated.) Modeled on the Bourse in Antwerp, the Exchange contained 150 small shops, making it one of the world's first shopping malls, but its primary purpose and virtue was that for .. | Bill Bryson | ||
| b7e98b5 | 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. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 11bd095 | satisfyingly dizzying | Bill Bryson | ||
| 145995d | his facetious grace in writing," and much else." | Bill Bryson | ||
| 41efaab | There is still quite a lot of life out there, but it is mostly very small. According to a wildlife census by an ecologist at the University of Illinois named V. E. Shelford, a typical ten-square-mile block of eastern American forest holds almost 300,000 mammals--220,000 mice and other small rodents, 63,500 squirrels and chipmunks, 470 deer, 30 foxes, and 5 black bears. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 8aa5e45 | BEFORE HE CAME INTO a lot of money in 1839, Richard Plantagenet Temple Nugent Brydges Chandos Grenville, second Duke of Buckingham and Chandos, led a largely uneventful life. | Bill Bryson | ||
| edc181a | The reason the Forest Service builds these roads, quite apart from the deep pleasure of doing noisy things in the woods with big yellow machines, is to allow private timber companies to get to previously inaccessible stands of trees. Of the Forest Service's 150 million acres of loggable land, about two-thirds is held in store for the future. The remaining one-third--49 million acres, or an area roughly twice the size of Ohio--is available f.. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 2371eb8 | his house at Stowe, in Buckinghamshire, had nine of the first flush toilets in England), | Bill Bryson | ||
| 7edb144 | Although nothing is known about the origin of the painting or where it was for much of the time before it came into the Chandos family in 1747, it has been said for a long time to be of William Shakespeare. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 28a2926 | In 1856, shortly before his death, Lord Ellesmere gave the painting to the new National Portrait Gallery in London as its founding work. As the gallery's first acquisition, it has a certain sentimental prestige, but almost at once its authenticity was doubted. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 0f0c14b | Dr. Tarnya Cooper, curator of sixteenth-century portraits at the gallery, told me one day when I set off to find out what we could know and reasonably assume about the most venerated figure of the English language. | Bill Bryson | ||
| dcacfc9 | Well, the earring tells us he was bohemian," she explained. "An earring on a man meant the same then as it does now--that the wearer was a little more fashionably racy than the average person. Drake and Raleigh were both painted with earrings. It was their way of announcing that they were of an adventurous disposition." | Bill Bryson | ||
| 6d0d3a9 | It was painted by someone who knew how to prime a canvas, so he'd had some training, but it is quite workaday and not well lighted. The main thing is that if it is Shakespeare, it is the only portrait known that might have been done from life, so this would be what William Shakespeare really looked like--if it is William Shakespeare. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 71ff36f | If the Chandos portrait is not genuine, then we are left with two other possible likenesses to help us decide what William Shakespeare looked like. The first is the copperplate engraving that appeared as the frontispiece of the collected works of Shakespeare in 1623--the famous First Folio. | Bill Bryson | ||
| ac4e158 | It has sometimes been said that prudery reached such a height in the nineteenth century that people took to dressing their piano legs in little skirts lest they rouse anyone to untimely passion. Thomas | Bill Bryson |