Quotes from Bill Bryson

of all the disciplines in science, paleoanthropology boasts perhaps the largest share of egos

If this book has a lesson, it is that we are awfully lucky to be here—and by "we" I mean every living thing. To attain any kind of life in this universe of ours appears to be quite an achievement. As humans we are doubly lucky, of course: We enjoy not only the privilege of existence but also the singular ability to appreciate it and even, in a multitude of ways, to make it better.

It is fairly amazing to reflect that at the beginning of the twentieth century, and for some years beyond, the best scientific minds in the world couldn't actually tell you where babies came from. And these, you may recall, were men who thought science was nearly at an end. *

In short, the remarkable position in which we find ourselves is that we don't actually know what we actually know. In

The thing about Ayers Rock is that by the time you finally get there you are already a little sick of it.

For the first 99.99999 per cent of our history as organisms, we were in the same ancestral line as chimpanzees.

Data from any single gene cannot really tell you anything so definitive. If

Resulta un tanto fascinante pensar que si tu mismo te fueses deshaciendo con unas pinzas, átomo a átomo, lo que producirías sería un montón de fino polvo atómico, nada del cual habría estado nunca vivo pero todo él habría sido en otro tiempo tú.

we should have a definitive total for insects in a little over fifteen thousand years.

In this sense, according to Harding, every gene is a different highway, and we have only barely begun to map the routes. "No single gene is ever going to tell you the whole story

It was full of lazy late-afternoon shadows and an impossible green lushness such as could only be appreciated by someone freshly arrived

Wallace's theory was, by Wallace's own admission, the result of a flash of insight; Darwin's was the product of years of careful, plodding, methodical thought. It was all crushingly unfair.

Then, about seven million years ago, something major happened. A group of new beings emerged from the tropical forests of Africa and began to move about on the open savanna. These

Wind back the tape of life21 to the early days of the Burgess Shale; let it play again from an identical starting point, and the chance becomes vanishingly small that anything like human intelligence would grace the replay.

If you wash lousy clothing at low temperatures, all you get is cleaner lice.

I think both sides have done a bit of a disservice to science by insisting that it must be one thing or the other. Things are likely to turn out to be not so straightforward as either camp would have you believe.

And yet in Britain, despite the constant buffetings of history, English survived. It is a cherishable irony that a language that succeeded almost by stealth, treated for centuries as the inadequate and second-rate tongue of peasants, should one day become the most important and successful language in the world.

It would be hard to think of a more overlooked person in the history of palaeontology than Mary Anning

This bewildered but well-meaning gentleman opposed his daughter's marriage to Captain Nungesser on the grounds--not unreasonable on the face of it--that Nungesser was destitute, broken-bodied, something of a bounder, unemployable except in time of war, and French.

In Hollywood, a young cartoonist named Walt Disney was inspired to create an animated short feature called "Plane Crazy" featuring a mouse who was also a pilot. The mouse was initially called Mortimer but soon assumed a more lasting place in the nation's hearts as Mickey.

I quite like Torquay and might one day come back, but I can tell you this now: where watch batteries are concerned, they can go fuck themselves.

As with so much else, you experience the world that your brain allows you to experience.

3.18-million-year-old australopithecine found at Hadar in Ethiopia in 1974 by a team led by Donald Johanson. Formally known as A.L.

It cannot be said too often: all life is one. That is, and I suspect will forever prove to be, the most profound true statement there is.