Quotes from Bill Bryson

Because it expands, ice floats on water—"an utterly bizarre property," according to John Gribbin.

Perhaps for our last words on the subject of usage we should turn to the last words of the venerable French grammarian Dominique Bonhours, who proved on his deathbed that a grammarian's work is never done when he turned to those gathered loyally around him and whispered: "I am about to—or I am going to—die; either expression is used.

Nobody deserves to go to the World Series more than the Chicago Cubs. But they can't go because that would spoil their custom of never going. It is an irreconcilable paradox.

For most of its history until fairly recent times the general pattern for Earth was to be hot with no permanent ice anywhere.

three minutes, 98 per cent of all the matter there is or will ever be has been produced. We have a universe.

Look at yourself in the mirror and reflect upon the fact that you are beholding ten thousand trillion cells, and that almost every one of them holds two yards of densely compacted DNA, and you begin to appreciate just how much of this stuff you carry around with you.

True smiles are brief—between two-thirds of a second and four seconds. That's why a held smile begins to look menacing. A true smile is the one expression that we cannot fake.

On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life

All that can really be said is that at some indeterminate point in the very distant past, for reasons unknown, there came the moment known to science as t = 0.

In fact, overwhelmingly museum displays are artificial.

Locally, changes have been even more dramatic. Greenland ice cores show the temperatures there changing by as much as fifteen degrees in ten years, drastically altering rainfall patterns and growing conditions.

The most elusive element of all, however, appears to be francium, which is so rare that it is thought that our entire planet may contain, at any given moment, fewer than twenty francium atoms.

At depth, microbes shrink in size and become extremely sluggish. The liveliest of them may divide no more than once a century18, some no more than perhaps once in five hundred years. As The Economist has put it: 'The key to long life, it seems, is not to do too much19.

that if you looked deep enough into space you should find some cosmic background radiation left over from the Big Bang.

in the words of Carl Sagan.

the strange behavior of the electron. The principal problem they faced was that the electron sometimes behaved like a particle and sometimes like a wave.

The Pacific is about a foot and a half higher along its western edge—a consequence of the centrifugal force created by the Earth's spin.

coloured temperature image of the first photons ever created, representing the most ancient light in the universe, which are detectable on Earth as a faint, steady background noise or—more familiarly to most of us—as part of the static on TV pictures.

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)

This is one reason why some experts believe that there may have been many other big bangs, perhaps trillions and trillions of them, spread through the mighty span of eternity, and that the reason we exist in this particular one is that this is one that we could exist in.

The universe was vaster—vastly vaster—than anyone had ever supposed.

When you look at a lake, you are looking at a collection of molecules that have been there on average for about a decade.

It isn't easy being an organism. In the whole universe, as far as we yet know, there is only one place, an inconspicuous outpost of the Milky Way called the Earth, that will sustain you, and even it can be pretty grudging.

we are here only because of timely extraterrestrial bangs and other random flukes.