Quotes from Bill Bryson

A typical submersible costs about $25,000 a day to operate, so they are hardly dropped into the water on a whim, still less put to sea in the hope that they will randomly stumble on something of interest. It's rather as if our firsthand experience of the surface world were based on the work of five guys exploring on garden tractors after dark.

When Emerson poetically noted that mosses favour the north sides of trees ('The moss upon the forest bark, was pole-star when the night was dark') he really meant lichens, for in the nineteenth century mosses and lichens weren't distinguished. True mosses aren't actually fussy about where they grow, so they are no good as natural compasses.

Drilling from a ship in open water is, in the words of one oceanographer, like trying to drill a hole in the sidewalks of New York from atop the Empire State Building using a strand of spaghetti.

Put another way, the amount of electricity going on within your cells is a thousand times greater than the electricity within your house. You are, in a very small way, exceedingly energetic.

can take up to ten million years to clean an ocean—but if you are not in a hurry it is marvellously efficient. Perhaps

They are, reluctantly or enthusiastically, accepting the idea that humans are as much an accident of nature as a product of orderly development." But

Nobody knows quite how destructive human beings are, but it is a fact that over the last fifty thousand years or so, wherever we have gone animals have tended to vanish, often in astonishingly large numbers. In

They had much in common. Both were spoiled, driven, self-centred, quarrelsome, jealous, mistrustful and ever unhappy.

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

the main expressed goal for oceanographers during International Geophysical Year, 1957/8, was to study "the use of ocean depths for the dumping of radioactive wastes." This wasn't a secret assignment, you understand, but a proud public boast. In

Generally speaking – which is of course always a dangerous thing to do, generally speaking – Americans revere the past only as long as there is some money in it somewhere and it doesn't mean going without air-conditioning, free parking and other essential conveniences.

In Australia and the Americas," says Tim Flannery, "the animals probably didn't know enough to run away.

Right up to the closing years of the eighteenth century... scientists everywhere searched for, and sometimes believed they had actually found, things that just weren't there: vitiated airs, dephlogisticated marine acids, phloxes, calxes, terraqueous exhalations and, above all, phlogiston, the substance that was thought to be the active agent in combustion. Somewhere in all this, it was thought, there also resided a mysterious élan vital, the force that brought inanimate objects to life.

You could see in an instant that she had been the local good-time girl since about 1931. She had "Ready for Sex" written all over her face, but "Better Bring a Paper Bag" written all over her body.

Before this dumping was halted in the 1990s, the United States had dumped many hundreds of thousands of drums into about fifty ocean sites—almost fifty thousand of them in the Fallarones alone.

the Bogdanov theory excited debate among physicists as to whether it was twaddle, a work of genius, or a hoax. 'Scientifically, it's clearly more or less complete nonsense, Columbia University physicist Peter Woit told the New York Times, 'but these days that doesn't much distinguish it from a lot of the rest of the literature.

In Iowa, we were not used to seeing the houses of well-known people on account of there were no well-known people in Iowa.

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. From

Steller's sea cow, named after the German naturalist Georg Steller, who discovered a small community of them living on Bering Island, off the coat of Siberia, in 1741. Hunted mercilessly by humans, within thirty years of its discovery by Steller this remarkable species was extinct.

We are each so atomically numerous and so vigorously recycled at death that a significant number of our atoms—up to a billion for each of us, it has been suggested—probably once belonged to Shakespeare.

explaining how a bucolic, lightly populated county like Norfolk could produce twenty-seven thousand archaeological finds a year, more than any other county in England.

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. And

when astronomers say that the galaxy M87 is 60 million light-years away, what they really mean ("but do not often stress to the general public") is that it is somewhere between 40 million and 90 million light-years away—not quite the same thing.

it was a pretty good insight into how unattractive science can get when you're playing at a certain level.