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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| a5a8c04 | It was a haven, a little island of light in the darkness of the downtown, very like the diner in Edward Hopper's painting 'The Nighthawks'. | Bill Bryson | ||
| c697c43 | An Association for Prevention of Premature Burial was established in Britain in 1899 and an American society was formed the following year. | Bill Bryson | ||
| d4ea227 | To avoid arousal more generally, women were instructed to get plenty of fresh air, avoid stimulating pastimes like reading and card games, and above all never to use their brains more than was strictly necessary. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 03223b3 | It's easy to make bricks, but making houses requires far more than throwing a pile of bricks in the air. | Bill Bryson | ||
| e62dcb7 | It is entirely possible that some terrestrial microbes are the products of different biogenesis events, in effect 'alien organisms', constituting a type of shadow biosphere | Bill Bryson | ||
| 5b2c90e | The universal tree of life on Earth might actually be a forest. | Bill Bryson | ||
| c25bf89 | Today's mathematics is intimately bound up with two key areas of human knowledge and activity: the natural world, and the society in which we live. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 90c00ea | But one must be careful when speaking of 'experimental science' before the Enlightenment, for it often meant demonstrating what one already knew to be the case - and if experiment seemed to contradict axiomatic reason, so much the worse for experiment. | Bill Bryson | ||
| fc77c10 | Almost all languages change. A rare exception is written Icelandic, which has changed so little that modern Icelanders can read sagas written a thousand years ago, and if Leif Ericson appeared on the streets of Reykjavik he could find his way around, allowing for certain difficulties over terms like airport and quarter-pound cheeseburger. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 1e19bec | Beware lest you lose the substance by grasping at the shadow. | Aesop | ||
| 0057763 | The fact that 'pure' and 'applied' science are useful and meaningful terms seduces us sometimes into thinking that they are real, absolute and distinct categories. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 79722ac | We need to understand why in a society so dependent on technology, a society that benefits so richly from the results of engineering, a society that rewards engineers so well, engineering isn't perceived as a desirable profession. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 5e07061 | People want everything. That's their problem. | Bill Bryson | ||
| e0a530e | Science is about making stuff, just as much as it is about understanding stuff. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 6232ebf | Despite the ambiguities I have just confessed to, most of me wants very badly not to die just yet, and I am sure the majority of writers and scientists working in this area agree. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 7e0bbc6 | Instead, we look for patterns in the facts, and some of these patterns we have come to call the laws of Nature, while others have achieved only the status of by-laws. | Bill Bryson | ||
| eff9bfe | To call human beings 'stewards' of this planet is like accepting that Jack the Ripper is the right man to start a Home for the Care and Protection of Fallen Women. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 049ce18 | Not only were the Anglo-Saxons relatively uncultured, they were also pagan, a fact rather quaintly preserved in the names of four of our weekdays, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday, which respectively commemorate the gods Tiw, Woden, and Thor, and Woden's wife, Frig. (Saturday, Sunday, and Monday, to complete the picture, take their names from Saturn, the sun, and the moon.) | Bill Bryson | ||
| c2eaad0 | Generally speaking - which is of course always a dangerous thing to do, generally speaking - Americans revere the past only as long as there is some money in it somewhere and it doesn't mean going without air-conditioning, free parking and other essential conveniences. | Bill Bryson | ||
| efe5e07 | If you can imagine a man having a vasectomy without anaesthetic to a background accompaniment of frantic sitar-playing, you will have some idea of what popular Turkish music is like. | Bill Bryson | ||
| b49dfe4 | Isn't it strange how wealth is always wasted on the rich? | Bill Bryson | ||
| a58538f | Eventually we crossed a plank over a narrow ditch, made our way across a grassless yard and entered a four-storey building that looked only half-finished. A cement mixer was standing by the stairwell. I was beginning to have my doubts. This was just the place for an ambush. | Bill Bryson | ||
| c0d9a09 | I read once that it takes 75,000 trees to produce one issue of the Sunday New York Times - and it's well worth every trembling leaf. So what if our grandchildren have no oxygen to breathe? Fuck 'em. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 54e1e16 | Incorporated into many of the facades are parts of the original structure - stairways that go nowhere, columns supporting nothing, niches that once clearly held Roman busts. The effect is that the houses look as if they grew magically out of the ruins. It is entrancing and there is no other place in Europe like it. | Bill Bryson | ||
| b7bba85 | On the way out my attention was caught by a machine making a lot of noise. A woman had just won $600. For ninety seconds the machine just poured out money, a waterfall of silver. When it stopped, the woman regarded the pile without pleasure and began feeding it back into the machine. I felt sorry for her. It was going to take her all night to get rid of that kind of money. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 2e3f973 | In Florence, the annual ratio of tourists to locals is 14:1. How can any place preserve any kind of independent life when it is so manifestly overwhelmed? It can't. It's as simple as that. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 894f0a5 | Then there would be many long minutes of commercials, mostly for products to keep one's bowels sleek, followed by filmed reports on regional murders, house fires, light airplane crashes, multiple car pile-ups on the Boulder Highway and other bits of local carnage, always with film of mangled vehicles, charred houses, bodies under blankets, and a group of children standing on the fringes, waving happily at the cameras and saying hi to their .. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 87c6c69 | It was accepted wisdom almost everywhere in the nineteenth century that the poor were poor because they were born to be. Although a few impoverished people might generously be described as undeserving, most were by nature "improvident, reckless and intemperate, and with habitual avidity for sensual gratification," as one government report crisply summarized it. Even Friedrich Engels, a far more sympathetic observer than most, could write in.. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 1918822 | It was always Christmas at my grandparents' house, or Thanksgiving, or the Fourth of July, or somebody's birthday. There was always happiness there. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 0922c62 | A few months earlier, when a state official named Bud Dwyer was similarly accused of corruption, he called a press conference, pulled out a gun and, as cameras rolled, blew his brains out. This led to an excellent local joke. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 515c533 | Even a long human life adds up to only about 650,000 hours. And when that modest milestone flashes into view, or at some other point thereabouts, for reasons unknown your atoms will close you down, then silently disassemble and go off to be other things. And that's it for you. | Bill Bryson | ||
| dbcd80d | Beware the wolf in sheep's clothing. | Aesop | ||
| 25c7e67 | Coming from a country where no one seemed to think it particularly disgraceful that a child with a brain tumour could be sent home to die because his father didn't have the wherewithal to pay a surgeon, or where an insurance company could be permitted by a state insurance commissioner to cancel the policies of its 14,000 sickest patients because it wasn't having a very good year (as happened in California in 1989), it seemed to me admirable.. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 1010400 | Ruskin never escaped his prudish ways or gave any indication of desiring to. After the death of J. M. W. Turner, in 1851, Ruskin was given the job of going through the works left to the nation by the great artist and found several watercolors of a cheerfully erotic nature. Horrified, Ruskin decided that they could only have been drawn "under a certain condition of insanity," and for the good of the nation destroyed almost all of them, robbi.. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 24b5d2a | In one well-known case, a woman named Martha Robinson was for years beaten and physically misused by a cruel and unstable husband. Eventually, he infected her with gonorrhea and then poisoned her almost to the point of death by slipping antivenereal powders into her food without her knowledge. Her health and spirit broken, she sued for divorce. The judge listened carefully to the arguments, then dismissed the case and sent Mrs. Robinson hom.. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 1b30c71 | The waitress, seeing how much I had left, asked me if I wanted a doggie bag. 'No thank you,' I said through a thin smile, 'I don't believe I could find a dog that would eat it. | Bill Bryson | ||
| ff9c67f | So Whitney's gin not only helped make many people rich on both sides of the Atlantic but also reinvigorated slavery, turned child labor into a necessity, and paved the way for the American Civil War. Perhaps at no other time in history has someone with a simple, well-meaning invention generated more general prosperity, personal disappointment, and inadvertent suffering than Eli Whitney with his gin. That is quite a lot of consequence for a .. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 6bd1e27 | That a word or phrase hasn't been recorded tells us only that it hasn't been recorded, not that it hasn't existed. The | Bill Bryson | ||
| bba146a | the starling, which was brought to America by one Eugene Schieffelin, a wealthy German emigrant who had the odd, and in the case of starlings regrettable, idea that he should introduce to the American landscape all the birds mentioned in the writings of Shakespeare. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 037c08e | One planet, one experiment15.' If this book has a lesson, it is that we are awfully lucky to be here - and by 'we' I mean every living thing. To attain any kind of life at all in this universe of ours appears to be quite an achievement. As humans we are doubly lucky, of course. We enjoy not only the privilege of existence, but also the singular ability to appreciate it and even, in a multitude of ways, to make it better. It is a trick we ha.. | Bill Bryson | ||
| f1f5739 | there any evidence that Henry ever uttered the other famous remark attributed to him: "I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death." Indeed, there is no evidence that Henry ever said anything of substance or found space in his head for a single original thought. He" | Bill Bryson | ||
| e00e3a6 | He had been born Thomas Pain, though upon arrival in America he whimsically changed the spelling to Paine, and he was about as unlikely a figure to change the course of history as you could imagine. A tumbledown drunk, coarse of manner, blotchy-faced and almost wholly lacking in acquaintance with the virtues of soap and water--"so neglectful in his person that he is generally the most abominably dirty being upon the face of the earth," in t.. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 70fe299 | For reasons that are still poorly understood, at depths beyond about 30 metres nitrogen becomes a powerful intoxicant. Under its influence divers had been known to offer their air hoses to passing fish or to decide to try to have a smoke break. It | Bill Bryson | ||
| a645620 | Until 1916, New Hampshire had a stream called the Quohquinapassakessamanagnog, but then the cheerless bureaucrats at the Board on Geographic Names in Washington, D.C., arbitrarily changed it to Beaver Creek. In | Bill Bryson |