Quotes from Bill Bryson

In fact, of course, the world was about to enter a century of science where many people wouldn't understand anything and none would understand everything.

The bone was sent to Dr. Caspar Wistar, the nation's leading anatomist, who described it at a meeting of the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia that autumn.

In America, Benjamin Franklin famously risked his life by flying a kite in an electrical storm.

growth. Often used contrarily by economists and those who write about them: 'It now looks as if growth will remain stagnant until spring' (Observer); '… with the economy moving into a negative growth phase' (The Times). Growth obviously indicates expansion. If a thing is shrinking or standing still, growth simply isn't the word for it.

For reasons that are still poorly understood, at depths beyond about 30 metres nitrogen becomes a powerful intoxicant. Under its influence divers had been known to offer their air hoses to passing fish or to decide to try to have a smoke break. It

Copenhagen is also the only city I've ever been in where office girls come out at lunchtime to sunbathe topless in the city parks. This alone earns it my vote for the European City of Culture for any year you care to mention.

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").

The World Wildlife Fund estimated in 1994 that the number of sharks killed each year was between 40 million and 70 million. As

In his secretiveness he didn't merely resemble Newton, but actively exceeded him.

The low doors of so many old European houses, on which those of us who are absentminded tend to crack our heads, are low not because people were shorter and required less headroom in former times, as is commonly supposed. People in the distant past were not in fact all that small. Doors were small for the same reason windows were small: they were expensive.

Altogether, according to John McPhee, [geological ages] number in the "tens of dozens." Fortunately, unless you take up geology as a career, you are unlikely ever to hear any of them again.

The upshot of all this is that we live in a universe whose age we can't quite compute, surrounded by stars whose distances we don't altogether know, filled with matter we can't identify, operating in conformance with physical laws whose properties we don't truly understand.

Life, in short, just wants to be.

an obligatory manifestation of matter, bound to arise wherever conditions are appropriate.

In the early Tertiary, if you were the size of a bobcat you could be king.

You discard about a hundred billion red blood cells every day. They are a big component of what makes your stools brown.

Called "On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies," it is one of the most extraordinary scientific papers ever published, as much for how it was presented as for what it said.

The Old English word for a slave was thrall, which is why when we are enslaved by an emotion we are enthralled.

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 discovery7: first, people deny that it is true; then they deny that it is important; finally they credit the wrong person.

blueprint as a metaphor for a design or plan is much overworked. If the temptation to use it is irresistible, at least remember that a blueprint is a completed plan, not a preliminary one.

I read once that it takes 75,000 trees to produce one issue of the Sunday New York Times – and it's well worth every trembling leaf. So what if our grandchildren have no oxygen to breathe? Fuck 'em.

Some of your microbes are permanent residents. Others camp out on you for a week or a month and then, like a wandering tribe, quietly vanish.

What an interesting and exciting thought. We may be only one of millions of advanced civilizations. Unfortunately, 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.

By 1842, Britain was using two-thirds of all the coal produced in the Western world.