Quotes from Bill Bryson

Owen. He coined the term Dinosauria in 1841. It means 'terrible lizard' and was a curiously inapt name.

IT WASN'T THAT MY MOTHER AND FATHER were indifferent to their children's physical well-being by any means. It was just that they seemed to believe that everything would be fine in the end and they were always right.

It is only the brevity of lifetimes that keeps us from appreciating the changes.

All of this came to me in the space of a lingering moment. I've said it before and I'll say it again. I like it here. I like it more than I can tell you.

further research has shown that there is or may well be a bacterial component in all kinds of other disorders46 – heart disease, asthma, arthritis, multiple sclerosis, several types of mental disorders, many cancers, even, it has been suggested (in Science no less), obesity.

If we were randomly inserted into the universe," Sagan wrote, "the chances that you would be on or near a planet would be less than one in a billion trillion trillion.

Glance at the night sky and what you see is history and lots of it—not the stars as they are now but as they were when their light left them.

On a cooler sun on a primordial earth: I later learned that biologists, when they are feeling jocose, refer to this as the 'Chinese Resaturant Problem'--because we has a dim sun.

It is a curious feature of our existence that we come from a planet that is very good at promoting life but even better at extinguishing it.

22 million tonnes of such unwanted fish are dumped back in the sea each year, mostly in the form of corpses.

Brain cells last as long as you do. You are issued with a hundred billion or so at birth and that is all you are ever going to get. It has been estimated that you lose five hundred of them an hour, so if you have any serious thinking to do there really isn't a moment to waste.

We live in a world that doesn't altogether seem to want us here.

Eventually he made it to Buckingham Palace, where the king famously startled Lindbergh by asking him how he had peed during the flight. Lindbergh explained, a touch awkwardly, that he had brought along a pail for the purpose.

Cook was a brilliant navigator and a conscientious observer, but he made one critical mistake on his first voyage: he took Australia's wet season for its dry one, and concluded that the country was more hospitable than it was.

In January of that year, according to a report written in America by a Times reporter, scientists were seriously investigating the possibility that a mysterious seismic disturbance in the remote Australian outback almost four years earlier had been a nuclear explosion set off by members of the Japanese doomsday cult Aum Shinrikyo.

Charles Darwin, driven to desperation by a mysterious lifelong malady that left him chronically lethargic, routinely draped himself with electrified zinc chains, doused his body with vinegar, and glumly underwent hours of pointless tingling in the hope that it would effect some improvement. It never did. The

His colleague Richard Feynman wanted to call these new basic particles partons16, as in Dolly, but was over-ruled. Instead they became known as quarks.

Sometimes the world just isn't ready for a good idea.

The next time you spray on Chanel No. 5 (assuming you do), you may wish to reflect that you are dousing yourself in distillate of unseen sea monster.

Water is strange stuff. It is formless and transparent, and yet we long to be beside it. It has no taste and yet we love the taste of it. We will travel great distances and pay small fortunes to see it in sunshine. And even though we know it is dangerous and drowns tens of thousands of people every year, we can't wait to frolic in it.

This is comfortable and clean and familiar. Apart from a tendency among men of a certain age to wear knee-high socks with shorts, these people are just like you and me.

Britain has 450,000 listed buildings, 20,000 scheduled ancient monuments, twenty-six World Heritage Sites, 1,624 registered parks and gardens (that is, gardens and parks of historic significance), 600,000 known archaeological sites (and more being found every day; more being lost, too), 3,500 historic cemeteries, 70,000 war memorials, 4,000 sites of special scientific interest, 18,500 medieval churches, and 2,500 museums containing 170 million objects.

As far as we can tell, we are the best there is. We may be all there is. It's an unnerving thought that we may be the living universe's supreme achievement and its worst nightmare simultaneously.

Every atom you possess has almost certainly passed through several stars and been part of millions of organisms on its way to becoming you.