Quotes from Bill Bryson

Thankfully for us, water seems unaware of the rules of chemistry or laws of physics. Everyone

Of the billions and billions of species of living thing that have existed since the dawn of time, most—99.99

Kazakhstan, it turns out, was once attached to Norway and New England.

THE FIRST TIME IN HISTORY PICTURES ARE FLASHED BY WIRE AND RADIO SYNCHRONIZING WITH SPEAKER'S VOICE COMMERCIAL USE IN DOUBT BUT AT&T HEAD SEES A NEW STEP IN CONQUEST OF NATURE AFTER YEARS OF RESEARCH

Although scientists were in an internationally co-operative mood, nations weren't.)

It really doesn't pay to go back and look again at the things that once delighted you, because it's unlikely they will delight you now.

The Earth at last had a position in space.

By the middle of the nineteenth century most learned people thought the Earth was at least a few million years old, perhaps even some tens of millions years old, but probably not more than that. So

space being spacious, the average distance between any two of these civilizations is reckoned to be at least two hundred light years, which is a great deal more than merely saying it makes it sound.

It would be hard to believe that the continuous movement of tectonic plates has no effect on the development of life on earth.

Orange roughy, a sluggish but delicious ocean fish, were caught in vast numbers before marine biologists realized how desperately susceptible to extinction they were.

Most star systems in the cosmos are binary (double-starred), which makes our solitary sun a slight oddity.

That's the thing about Australia, you see. It teems with interesting stuff, but at the same time it's so vast and empty and forbidding that it generally takes a remarkable stroke of luck to find it. Unfortunately

Our carelessness is all the more alarming since the discovery that many other ailments may be bacterial in origin. The process of discovery began in 1983 when Barry Marshall, a doctor in Perth, Western Australia, found that many stomach cancers and most stomach ulcers are caused by a bacterium called Helicobacter pylori.

I remember once reading that the tenth Duke of Marlborough, on a visit to one of his daughter's homes, announced in consternation from the top of the stairs that his toothbrush wasn't foaming properly. It turned out that his valet had always put toothpaste on his brush for him, and as a consequence the duke was unaware that dental implements didn't foam up spontaneously. I rest my case.

Isn't it strange how wealth is always wasted on the rich?

he was the most gifted English scientist of his age, but also the strangest. He suffered, in the words of one of his few biographers, from shyness to a 'degree bordering on disease'19. Any human contact was for him a source of the deepest discomfort.

Over time, each of these principal groupings split into further subdivisions, of which some prospered and some faltered. Anapsids gave rise to the turtles, which for a time, perhaps a touch improbably, appeared poised to predominate as the planet's most advanced and deadly species, before an evolutionary lurch let them settle for durability rather than dominance.

Even his housekeeper communicated with him by letter.

Hoping to settle the matter once and for all, in 1969 food scientists from all over the world convened at 'An Origin of Corn Conference' at the University of Illinois, but the debates grew so vituperative and bitter, and at times personal, that the conference broke up in confusion, and no papers from it were ever published.

Other than in churches and a few wealthy homes, window glass was a rarity well into the 1600s. Eleanor Godfrey, in her history of glass-making, notes how in 1590 an alderman in Doncaster left his house to his wife but the windows to his son. The owners of Alnwick Castle from the same period always had their windows taken out and stored when they were away to minimize the risk of breakage.

The Statute of Artificers of 1563 laid down that all artificers (craftsmen) and laborers "must be and continue at their work, at or before five of the clock in the morning, and continue at work, and not depart, until between seven and eight of the clock at night"—giving an eighty-four-hour workweek.

Many fishermen "fin" sharks—that is, slice their fins off, then dump them back into the water to die.

one cannot "predict future events exactly if one cannot even measure the present state of the universe precisely!