Quotes from Bill Bryson

no less than 99.5 per cent of the world's habitable space by volume, according to one estimate, is fundamentally—in practical terms completely—off limits to us. It

I mused for a few moments on the question of which was worse, to lead a life so boring that you are easily enchanted or a life so full of stimulus that you are easily bored.

appears that at least 90 percent of the universe, and perhaps as much as 99 percent, is composed of Fritz Zwicky's "dark matter"—stuff that is by its nature invisible to us.

DNA is, as it were, especially unalive. It is "among the most nonreactive, chemically inert molecules in the living world

pair of Stephens Island wrens, which were found only on a small, isolated island in New Zealand's Cook Strait. All were killed by a lighthouse keeper's cat.

One of the more striking features of Sweden and Norway is how much public drunkenness there is. I mean here you have two countries where you cannot buy a beer without taking out a bank loan, where successive governments have done everything in their power to make drinking not worth the cost and effort, and yet everywhere you go you see grossly intoxicated people – in stations, on park benches, in shopping centres. I don't begin to understand it

How fast a man's beard grows, for instance, is partly a function of how much he thinks about sex (because thinking about sex produces a testosterone surge).

Peale was a lover of birds, and yet did not hesitate to kill them in large numbers for no better reason than that it interested him to do so.

two-thirds of the universe is still missing from the balance sheet

As Donald Goldsmith notes, 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.

She was torn between her customer service training and her youthful certitude.

Nowadays they don't show test patterns at all on American TV, which is a shame because given a choice between test patterns and TV evangelists, I would unhesitatingly choose the test patterns. They were soothing in an odd way and, of course, they didn't ask you for money or make you listen to their son-in-law sing.

Consider the oft-quoted statement "the exception proves the rule." Most people take this to mean that the exception confirms the rule, though when you ask them to explain the logic in that statement, they usually cannot. After all, how can an exception prove a rule? It can't. The answer is that an earlier meaning of prove was to test (a meaning preserved in proving ground) and with that meaning the statement suddenly becomes sensible—the exception tests the rule.

Suicide by lifestyle takes ages.

the people who were most intensely interested in the world's living things were the ones most likely to extinguish them. No-one

For the most part our fate and comfort—and even our eye color—are determined not by individual genes but by complexes of genes working in alliance.

In a funny way, nothing makes you feel more like a native of your own country than to live where nearly everyone is not.

It had never once occurred to me in thirty-six years of living that anyone listened to Mexican music for pleasure. Yet here there were a dozen stations blaring it out. After each song, a disc jockey would come on and jabber for a minute or two in Spanish in the tone of a man who has just had his nuts slammed in a drawer.

It appears that the universe may not only be filled with dark matter, but with dark energy.

The day when people once again die from the scratch of a rose thorn may not be far away.

Alpha Centauri

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. A billion more each came from Buddha and Genghis Khan and Beethoven, and any other historical figure you care to name.

The genome, as Eric Lander of MIT has put it, is like a parts list for the human body: it tells us what we are made of, but says nothing about how we work.

I took a train to Liverpool. they were having a festival when I arrived. Citizens had taken time off from their busy activities to add crisp packets, empty cigarette boxes and carrier-bags to the other wise bland and neglected landscape.