Quotes from Bill Bryson

In the United States, frozen cheese pizza is regulated by the Food and Drug Administration. Frozen pepperoni pizza, on the other hand, is regulated by the Department of Agriculture.

We are not only what we do, we are also what we imagine.

A hundred years after his death, a statue of Lavoisier was erected in Paris and much admired until someone pointed out that it looked nothing like him. Under questioning the sculptor admitted that he had used the head of the mathematician and philosopher the Marquis de Condorcet—apparently he had a spare—in the hope that no one would notice or, having noticed, would care.

Capgras syndrome is a condition in which sufferers become convinced that those they know well are imposters. In Klüver-Bucy syndrome the victim develops urges to eat and fornicate indiscriminately (to the understandable dismay of loved ones).46 Perhaps the most bizarre of all is Cotard delusion, in which the sufferer believes he is dead and cannot be convinced otherwise.47

we're going to be in the wilderness in three days. There won't be doughnut stores.

It is perhaps little wonder that the end of Victorianism almost exactly coincided with the invention of psychoanalysis.

the books tell you that if the grizzly comes for you, on no account should you run. This is the sort of advice you get from someone who is sitting at a keyboard when he gives it. Take it from me, if you are in an open space with no weapons and a grizzly comes for you, run. You may as well. If nothing else, it will give you something to do with the last seven seconds of your life. However, when the grizzly overtakes

Scheele independently discovered eight elements—chlorine, fluorine, manganese, barium, molybdenum, tungsten, nitrogen, and oxygen—but received credit for none of them in his lifetime. He had an unfortunate habit of tasting every substance he worked with, as a way of familiarizing himself with its properties, and eventually the practice caught up with him.

Perforated eardrums were quite common16, too; but, as Haldane reassuringly noted in one of his essays, 'the drum generally heals up; and if a hole remains in it, although one is somewhat deaf, one can blow tobacco smoke out of the ear in question, which is a social accomplishment.

Looking for a supernova, therefore, was a little like standing on the observation platform of the Empire State Building with a telescope and searching windows around Manhattan in the hope of finding, let us say, someone lighting a twenty-first birthday cake.

Shenandoah National Park is lovely. It is possibly the most wonderful national park I have ever been in, and, considering the impossible and conflicting demands put on it, it is extremely well run. Almost at once it became my favorite part of the Appalachian Trail.

In fact, mostly what the Forest Service does is build roads.

Noting the lack of crime or security in the Netherlands, the author asked a native who guarded a national landmark. He got the replay, We all do.

My first rule of consumerism is never buy anything you can't make your children carry.

Once in a great while, a few times in history, a human mind produces an observation so acute and unexpected that people can't quite decide which is the more amazing – the fact or the thinking of it.

And now the state was about to bring the law back, proving conclusively that the danger for Tennesseans isn't so much that they may be descended from apes as overtaken by them.

The Moon is slipping from our grasp at a rate of about 1.5 inches a year. In another two billion years it will have receded so far that it won't keep us steady and we will have to come up with some other solution, but in the meantime you should think of it as much more than just a pleasant feature in the night sky.

Das Fazit aus alledem lautet: Wir leben in einem Universum, dessen Alter wir nicht berechnen können, umgeben von Sternen, deren Entfernung wir nicht kennen, zwischen Materie, die wir nicht identifizieren können, und alles funktioniert nach physikalischen Gesetzen, deren Eigenschaften wir eigentlich nicht verstehen.

But I love to drink. I can't help it. I mean, I love it Bryson-love the taste, love that buzz you get when you've had a couple, love the smell and feel of the taverns. I miss dirty jokes and the click of pool balls in the background, and that kind of bluish, under lit glow of a bar at night.

The patients on Tuke Ward were a pleasant and tractable bunch and practised insanity with a certain elan.

We are the only creature that can harm at a distance.

I would submit that if you think the only people you should have in your country are the people you produce yourselves, you are an idiot.

As Herman Melville put it: "We are not so much a nation as a world.

One of the hardest ideas for humans to accept," he says, "is that we are not the culmination of anything.