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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 4b8dbc1 | The price paid was PS700 - which historians are always obliged to qualify with the phrase 'a considerable amount of money in those days'. However, no price is relevant when the prize is priceless. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 9ec919a | was headed for Nebraska. Now there's a sentence you don't want to have to say too often if you can possibly help it. Nebraska must be the most unexciting of all the states. Compared with it, Iowa is paradise. Iowa at least is fertile and green and has a hill. Nebraska is like a 75,000-square-mile bare patch. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 193d917 | Nor, strictly speaking, is it correct to call them Puritans. They were Separatists, so called because they had left the Church of England. Puritans were those who remained in the Anglican Church but wished to purify it. They wouldn't arrive in America for another decade, | Bill Bryson | ||
| 4eb421c | camouflage (rather oddly from camouflet, meaning "to blow smoke up someone's nose," a pastime that appears on the linguistic evidence to be specific to the French)," | Bill Bryson | ||
| ec07b2d | The exhibition for which it was conceived was the dream of a civil servant named Henry Cole, whose other principal claim to history's attention is as the inventor of the Christmas card | Bill Bryson | ||
| 6d8e907 | Do not count your chickens before they are hatched. | Aesop | ||
| ae8e04f | I drove on into Des Moines and it looked very large and handsome in the afternoon sunshine. The golden dome of the state capitol building gleamed. Every yard was dark with trees. People were out cutting the grass or riding bikes. I could see why strangers came in off the interstate looking for hamburgers and gasoline and stayed forever. There was just something about it that looked friendly and decent and nice. I could live here, I thought,.. | Bill Bryson | ||
| ccd4309 | Coming in to land at the recently opened Boston Airport (on the site of the present Logan Airport), he raced across Boston Harbor just above the water line, then at the last possible instant shot straight up into the sky to the point where it looked as if his plane must surely stall, then nonchalantly rolled to one side in a graceful arc and made a pinpoint landing, coming to a halt just before the doors of the hangar set aside for his arri.. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 331e065 | Chicago was to corruption what Pittsburgh was to steel or Hollywood to motion pictures. It refined and cultivated it, and embraced it without embarrassment. | Bill Bryson | ||
| cf13c52 | I bought a morning newspaper and found my way into a cafe. It always amazes me how seldom visitors bother with local papers. Personally I can think of nothing more exciting--certainly nothing you could do in a public place with a cup of coffee--than to read newspapers from a part of the world you know almost nothing about. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 63bb564 | For much the same reason, early owners discovered that if they charged odd amounts like 49 cents or 99 cents the cashier would very probably have to open the drawer to extract a penny change, obviating the possibility of the dreaded unrecorded transaction. Only later did it dawn on merchants that $1.99 had the odd subliminal quality of seeming markedly cheaper than $2.) | Bill Bryson | ||
| 894bc9d | the Pilgrims didn't have to learn Algonquian for the happy and convenient reason that Samoset and Squanto spoke English--Samoset only a little, but Squanto with total assurance (and some Spanish into the bargain). | Bill Bryson | ||
| 2727d3c | But Pauline would not take advice, She lit a match, it was so nice! It crackled so, it burned so clear,-- Exactly like the picture here She jumped for joy and ran about, And was too pleased to put it out. Now see! Oh see! What a dreadful thing The fire has caught her apron-string; Her apron burns, her arms, her hair; She burns all over, everywhere. | Bill Bryson | ||
| f9a0b75 | And there you have the difference between the Midwest and the West, ladies and gentlemen. People in the Midwest are nice. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 4cb70d8 | Columbus never found Antilla or anything else he was looking for. His epochal voyage of 1492 was almost the last thing--indeed almost the only thing--that went right in his life. Within eight years, he would find himself summarily relieved of his post as Admiral of the Ocean Sea, returned to Spain in chains, and allowed to sink into such profound obscurity that we don't know for sure where he is buried. To achieve such a precipitous fall in.. | Bill Bryson | ||
| e55f372 | Indeed, it has been suggested that there isn't a single bit of any of us - not so much as a stray molecule - that was part of us nine years ago. | Bill Bryson | ||
| c7f74f9 | In fact, if you are in a partnership now with someone from your own race and country, the chances are excellent that you are at some level related. | Bill Bryson | ||
| c8e1095 | If talking pictures could be said to have a father, it was Lee De Forest, a brilliant but erratic inventor of electrical devices of all types. (He had 216 patents.) In 1907, while searching for ways to boost telephone signals, De Forest invented something called the thermionic triode detector. De Forest's patent described it as "a System for Amplifying Feeble Electric Currents" and it would play a pivotal role in the development of broadcas.. | Bill Bryson | ||
| c61b3c8 | Filming was done outside San Antonio, Texas. The scale of the production was vast and complex. Whole battlefields were scrupulously re-created on the plains of Texas. Wellman deployed as many as five thousand extras and sixty airplanes in some scenes--an enormous logistical exercise. The army sent its best aviators from Selfridge Field in Michigan--the very men with whom Lindbergh had just flown to Ottawa--and stunt fliers were used for the.. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 2bfdb77 | Bow was originally billed as the "Brooklyn Bonfire," then as the "Hottest Jazz Baby in Films," but in 1927 she became, and would forevermore remain, the "It Girl." "It" was first a two-part article and then a novel by a flame-haired English novelist named Elinor Glyn, who was known for writing juicy romances in which the main characters did a lot of undulating ("she undulated round and all over him, twined about him like a serpent") and for.. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 08b9afc | a basic unit of measure in chemistry, which was named for Avogadro long after his death. It is the number of molecules found in 2.016 grams of hydrogen gas (or an equal volume of any other gas). Its value is placed at 6.0221367 x 1023, which is an enormously large number. Chemistry students have long amused themselves by computing just how large a number it is, so I can report that it is equivalent to the number of popcorn kernels needed to.. | Bill Bryson | ||
| ede65ed | Can we "belong anywhere?" Should we try?" | Bill Bryson | ||
| 64a764a | Once there were many more in like vein--e.g., tuifu ("the ultimate in fuckups), tarfu ("things are really fucked up"), fubar ("fucked up beyond all recognition"), and fubid ("fuck you, buddy, I'm detached")." | Bill Bryson | ||
| 1e12ecb | There are really only two ways to get hit on the head by a parking barrier. One is to stand underneath a raised barrier and purposely allow it to fall on you. That is the easy way, obviously. The other method--and this is where a little diminished mental capacity can go a long way--is to forget the barrier you have just seen rise, step into the space it has vacated and stand with lips pursed while considering your next move, and then be tak.. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 200cb17 | The positive side of thinking you are about to die is that it does make you glad of the little life that is left to you. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 66a184d | if we wished to find a modern-day model for British and American speech of the late eighteenth century, we could probably do no better than Yosemite Sam. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 34cd817 | In six years, Hoover circled the globe five times. He lived through the Boxer Rebellion in China, hacked through the jungles of Borneo, rode camels across the red emptiness of Western Australia, rubbed shoulders with Wyatt Earp and Jack London in a Klondike saloon, camped beside the Great Pyramids of Egypt. He had experiences as rich and memorable as any young man has ever enjoyed, and was moved by none of them. In | Bill Bryson | ||
| 662a4c3 | The country accepted it not only willingly, but almost absent-mindedly. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 097f060 | All of this is by way of coming around to the somewhat paradoxical observation that we speak with remarkable laxness and imprecision and yet manage to express ourselves with wondrous subtlety--and simply breathtaking speed. In normal conversation we speak at a rate of about 300 syllables a minute. To do this we force air up through the larynx--or supralaryngeal vocal tract, to be technical about it--and, by variously pursing our lips and fl.. | Bill Bryson | ||
| e0dcfe4 | It is perhaps little wonder that the end of Victorianism almost exactly coincided with the invention of psychoanalysis. | psychoanalysis victorian victorian-age victorian-era | Bill Bryson | |
| 26a425d | The dinosaurs, built of concrete, were a kind of bonus attraction. On New Year's Eve 1853 a famous dinner for twenty-one prominent scientists was held inside the unfinished iguanodon. Gideon Mantell, the man who had found and identified the iguanodon, was not among them. The person at the head of the table was the greatest star of the young science of palaeontology. His name was Richard Owen and by this time he had already devoted several p.. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 1c2d6e6 | If you have ever wondered why radio and television stations always have call signs beginning with W or K, the answer is that those letters were assigned to American airwaves by an international convention held in London in 1912. The United States was given the call letters A, N, W, and K. A and N were reserved respectively for the army and navy. The other two were given to public broadcasters. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 874b4ca | I have long known that it is part of God's plan for me to spend a little time with each of the most stupid people on earth, and Mary Ellen was proof that even in the Appalachian woods I would not be spared. | Bill Bryson | ||
| f1b5b81 | 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. | Bill Bryson | ||
| cd2bc58 | In 1964, the largest earthquake ever recorded in North America rocked Alaska with 200,000 megatons of concentrated might, the equivalent of 2,000 nuclear bombs. Almost 3,000 miles away in Texas, water sloshed out of swimming pools. A street in Anchorage fell twenty feet. The quake devastated 24,000 square miles of wilderness, much of it glaciated. And what effect did all this might have on Alaska's glaciers? None. | Bill Bryson | ||
| f1b0b06 | nostalgia such as can be known only by those who remember the days of hot metal typesetting and noisy composing rooms | Bill Bryson | ||
| d054fe4 | Travel is like love, mostly because it's a heightened state of awareness, in which we are mindful, receptive, undimmed by familiarity and ready to be transformed. That is why the best trips, like the best love affairs, never really end." All love affairs, all long-term relationships--travel included--demand that we keep an element of mystery alive and kicking." | Bill Bryson | ||
| 1eab431 | As early colonists employed odd spellings, so too they often brought unexpected pronunciations with them. This was particularly the case in Virginia, where the leading families had a special fondness for pronouncing their family names in improbable ways, so that Sclater became "Slaughter," Munford became "Mumfud," Randolph was "Randall," Wyatt was "Wait," Devereaux was "Deverecks," Callowhill was "Carroll," Higginson was "Hickerson," Norswo.. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 45bb6b3 | The Appalachians are the home of one of the world's great hardwood forests | Bill Bryson | ||
| a5d73d2 | explanations, like dreams, only make sense while they're happening. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 1565269 | E Pluribus Unum, "One from Many," was taken from, of all places, a recipe for salad in an early poem by Virgil.)" | Bill Bryson | ||
| bdd7d30 | Magazines boomed, too. Advertising revenues leaped 500 percent in the decade, and many publications of lasting importance made their debut: Reader's Digest in 1922, Time in 1923, the American Mercury and Smart Set in 1924, The New Yorker in 1925. Time was perhaps the most immediately influential | Bill Bryson | ||
| 4dde293 | Above all, the 1920s was a golden age for newspapers. Newspaper sales in the decade rose by about a fifth, to 36 million copies a day--or 1.4 newspapers for every household. New York City alone had twelve daily papers, and almost all other cities worthy of the name had at least two or three. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 244a301 | Look at yourself in the mirror and reflect upon the fact that you are beholding ten thousand trillion cells, and that almost every one of them holds two yards of densely compacted DNA, and you begin to appreciate just how much of this stuff you carry around with you. | Bill Bryson |