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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 4943f62 | Baseball remains one of the most fertile grounds for inventive wordplay in American life. Among the more notable--and on the face of it more bewildering--recent neologisms are to dial 8 for a home run and Linda Ronstadt for a good fastball. Dial 8 comes from the practice among hotels of requiring customers to dial 8 for a long-distance line. Linda Ronstadt, more complicatedly, is an allusion to her song "Blue Bayou," the significance of whi.. | Bill Bryson | ||
| d93e200 | The murder of poor Albert Snyder had one other unusual feature: the people responsible were caught. That didn't actually happen much in America in the 1920s. New York recorded 372 murders in 1927; in 115 of those cases no one was arrested. Where arrests were made, the conviction rate was less than 20 percent. Nationally, according to a survey made by the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company--and it is notable that the best records were kept .. | Bill Bryson | ||
| ada8f96 | If all the ice sheets melted, sea levels would rise by 60 metres. | Bill Bryson | ||
| c26a4a2 | Absolute brain size does not tell you everything - It is relative size that matters, a point that is often overlooked. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 934ad2c | She had, I realized, Retail Tourette's Syndrome, a compulsion to blurt advice. There was nothing she could do about it. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 7f6a215 | If you have a morbid fear of peanut butter sticking to the roof of your mouth, there is a word for it: arachibutyrophobia... And there's a word for describing a sudden breaking off of thought: aposiopesis... When you are just dropping off to sleep and you experience that sudden sensation of falling, there is a word for it: it's a myoclonic jerk. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 2d5fcc4 | Some of these words deserve to be better known. Take velleity, which describes a mild desire, a wish or urge too slight to lead to action. Doesn't that seem a useful term? Or how about sluibbergegullion, a seventeenth-century word signifying a worthless or slovenly fellow? Or ugsome, a late medieval word meaning loathsome or disgusting. | Bill Bryson | ||
| bf794aa | 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 | ||
| b61ef08 | By comparison, the practice of one Frank Huntington Beebe of keeping two mansions side by side--one to live in, one to decorate over and over--seems admirably restrained. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 79fb21c | designed and built the world's first municipal park. This park so captivated the American landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted that he modeled Central Park in New York on it. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 9947bc0 | From this I think we can conclude that the definitive English holorime has yet to be written. However, an old children's riddle does seem to come close. It is the one that poses the question "How do you prove in three steps that a sheet of paper is a lazy dog?" The answer: (1) a sheet of paper is an ink-lined plane; (2) an inclined plane is a slope up; (3) a slow pup is a lazy dog." | language | Bill Bryson | |
| 1583e9f | The belief that "and" should not be used to begin a sentence is without foundation. And that's all there is to it." | Bill Bryson | ||
| ae70eb8 | noticed on my city map that just up the road was the Musee International de la Croix-Rouge et du Croissant-Rouge (the International Museum of the Red Cross and Red Breakfast Roll), which sounded much more promising to me. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 25e24dd | That is why, for instance, horses in New England (as in East Anglia) neigh, while those in the middle states of America (and the Midlands of England) whinny. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 916509f | For anyone of a rational disposition, fashion is often nearly impossible to fathom. Throughout many periods of history--perhaps most--it can seem as if the whole impulse of fashion has been to look maximally ridiculous. If one could be maximally uncomfortable as well, the triumph was all the greater. | Bill Bryson | ||
| c2bfce8 | Dressing impractically is a way of showing that one doesn't have to do physical work. | Bill Bryson | ||
| e864d2e | In a sense William Shakespeare's greatest achievement in life wasn't writing Hamlet or the sonnets but just surviving his first year. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 2b36891 | It is extraordinary to think that before he settled in London and became celebrated as a playwright, history provides just four recorded glimpses of Shakespeare--at his baptism, his wedding, and the two births of his children. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 1c5cac1 | Never has the promise of glowing skin been more dangerously apt than in the early years of the twentieth century when radium was commonly used as a featured ingredient in beauty products. (credit 7.11) | Bill Bryson | ||
| 22373bc | Although the Spirit of St. Louis looked metallic, and was often described as such in newspaper reports, only the nose cowling was actually of metal. With only a thin layer of canvas between the pilot and the outside world, the Spirit of St. Louis was deafeningly noisy and unnervingly insubstantial. It would have been rather like crossing the ocean in a tent. | Bill Bryson | ||
| ea16a22 | Not incidentally, lead's symbol is Pb, for the Latin plumbum, the source word for our modern plumbing.) The Romans also flavored their wine with lead, which may be part of the reason they are not the | Bill Bryson | ||
| 7aa86f5 | Rich women, including the queen, made themselves additionally beauteous by bleaching their skin with compounds of borax, sulfur, and lead--all at least mildly toxic, | Bill Bryson | ||
| fe3a1d2 | Alexander von Humboldt, yet another friend, may have had Agassiz at least partly in mind when he observed that there are three stages in scientific discovery: first, people deny that it is true; then they deny that it is important; finally they credit the wrong person. | Bill Bryson | ||
| e656f98 | The best indicator of personal risk is whether you have fallen much before. Accident proneness is a slightly controversial area among stair-injury epidemiologists, but it does seem to be a reality. About four persons in ten injured in a stair fall have been injured in a stair fall before. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 965ddaf | Familiarity breeds contempt. | Aesop | ||
| ffc08fa | A simple, elegant game. Like riding a bicycle, once you've learned you can hardly fail to pick it up again, that is unless the brakes are out of order. | Jonathan Lethem | ||
| 154e4f0 | Open duh computer." Germans ought to farm out all positions of petty authority. The accent remained too full of implication." | Jonathan Lethem | ||
| 0304afd | exemplified the dull rigidity of Singapore's old colonial fantasies about itself. | Jonathan Lethem | ||
| 41c7a27 | How's it feel to be a worthless jumbo diddly-ass puppetool? | Jonathan Lethem | ||
| 23584aa | Guilt wants to cover all the bases, be everywhere at once, reach into the past to tweak, neaten and repair. Guilt like Tourettic utterance flows uselessly, inelegantly from one helpless human to another, contemptuous of perimeters, doomed to be mistaken or refused on delivery. | Jonathan Lethem | ||
| 4623794 | Anonymous, where among the hard-bitten, laid-off-lathe-operator | Jonathan Lethem | ||
| e31b4d2 | Als ich einmal kurz allein in seiner Wohnung war, fand ich unter den verstreuten Papieren einen Fetzen mit Lyrik, das einzig Schriftliche neben seinen kritischen Exegesen, was ich je von ihm gesehen habe. Eine unvollstandige, verworfene Ode: "O Koffein!/Du zeitgemasses ZiehnFliehn/ich hab dir ins Gesicht gespien/du hast mir ins Gesicht/ubers Gesicht..." Und tatsachlich waren auf dem Blatt zahlreiche Abdrucke einer Kaffeetasse zu sehen." | Jonathan Lethem | ||
| 4fc81a6 | I am exiting the wider world, to return to my homeland of bullying, psychosis, and bad taste. Forgive me. It is a medical matter. Once | Jonathan Lethem | ||
| 7a5507c | Her presence was sturdy and watery at once, arms weirdly muscled, nipples like small tongues riding on the mercurial flesh that glided on his surface, thighs smooth to where his fingers plummeted inside, followed by the rest of him. The golf-ball cyst swam too, faintly present against him, a feature, not a bug. Tira, for all her usual chatter, wasn't a screamer or even a moaner. In the silence their breaths fell into concert with the whinin.. | Jonathan Lethem | ||
| 58a8b0c | The clacking of the checkers on the hardwood points was the music of honest thought, resounding in silence as it navigated the fortunes told by the pips on the dice. | Jonathan Lethem | ||
| 444b031 | The lowliest European functionary--a border inspector, say--dressed immaculately, and furnished even a cubicle to lend an impression of respectability. A truly wealthy man, like Stolarsky, pronounced his status in paneling, burnished wood, fountain pens, leather volumes. Bruno banished the despondent thought; this baleful room was Europe's nullification. "What's the matter, I trample on your delicate sensibilities?" | Jonathan Lethem | ||
| 379f919 | His ironies were ghoulish now. | Jonathan Lethem | ||
| 12c87c4 | Minutes died serially into hours. Bruno | Jonathan Lethem | ||
| 78df775 | Bruno's brain might have parachuted somewhere over the Atlantic. | Jonathan Lethem | ||
| b41f003 | Not everything needed to rise to converge: It could just drift together into the indiscernible middle, and bewilder you. | Jonathan Lethem | ||
| 2e26d26 | Baader-Meinhof Gruppe, they are called also." "Yes." | Jonathan Lethem | ||
| 98ed1ad | On Telegraph, she stopped him in front of Walgreens, put the sack into his hands, a finger to her lips. "I'll come back." He was left to contemplate the sidewalk, full of listless earring vendors ready with their piercing guns." | Jonathan Lethem | ||
| ef5b70b | First, however, and feeling real excitement at the thought, the good burst of adrenaline at last, Behringer wanted to dismantle the sockets and loosen his patient's eyes. Behringer | Jonathan Lethem | ||
| bbc41f5 | Hospital" turned out to represent a punctuated tedium, the recurrence of blood pressure and temperature checks, the placement and emptying of bedpans and painful switching of IV lines from the crook of one elbow to the other, and the switching of nurses as day and night were destroyed and replaced with tripartite shifts." | Jonathan Lethem |