Quotes from Bill Bryson

However senior or accomplished, they were not allowed into the college's senior common room but instead had to take their meals in a more utilitarian chamber

They maintain their own DNA. They reproduce at a different time from their host cell. They look like bacteria, divide like bacteria, and sometimes respond to antibiotics in the way bacteria do.

When even camels can't manage a desert, you know you've found a tough part of the world.

The telephone," he wrote, "may be briefly described as an electrical contrivance for reproducing in different places the tones and articulations of a speaker's voice so that Conversations can be carried on by word of mouth between persons in different rooms, in different streets or in different Towns.… The great advantage it possesses over every other form of electrical apparatus is that it requires no skill to operate the instrument.

MACHOs (for MAssive Compact Halo Objects—really just another name for black holes, brown dwarfs and other very dim stars).

vanity as humans that we tend to think of evolution as a process that, in effect, was programmed to produce us.

I now know that there is a happy abundance of science writers who pen the most lucid and thrilling prose—Timothy Ferris, Richard Fortey, and Tim Flannery

It is a truly astounding fact that for the longest time the people who were most intensely interested in the world's living things were the ones most likely to extinguish them.

WIMPs (for Weakly Interacting Massive Particles, which is to say specks of invisible matter left over from the Big

Mars-sized object slammed into Earth, blowing out enough material to create the Moon from the debris.

Homo erectus was the first to hunt, the first to use fire, the first to fashion complex tools, the first to leave evidence of campsites, the first to look after the weak and frail.

Far from marking the outer edge of the solar system, as those schoolroom maps so cavalierly imply, Pluto is barely one-fifty-thousandth of the way.

I love the way the Italians park. You turn any street corner in Rome and it looks as if you've just missed a parking competition for blind people.

The white people never looked at the Aborigines, and the Aborigines never looked at the white people. The two races seemed to inhabit separate but parallel universes. I felt as if I was the only person who could see both groups at once.

It occurred to me that Australians are so surrounded with danger that they have evolved an entirely new vocabulary to deal with it.

The movie was an enormous hit in 1927. With Wings, it confirmed Bow as Hollywood's leading female star. She received forty thousand letters a week—more than the population of a fair-sized town. In the summer of 1927, her career seemed set to go on indefinitely. In fact, it was nearly at an end. Winsome and enchanting as she was to behold, her Brooklyn accent was the vocal equivalent of nails on a blackboard, and in the new world of talking pictures that would never do.

In my experience, the last people you want trying to solve any problem, but especially those involving roads, are highway engineers. They operate from the principle that while no traffic problem can ever truly be solved, it can be spread over a much larger area.

it became fixed in many people's minds that MSG was a kind of toxin. In fact, it isn't.

By comparison, the practice of one Frank Huntington Beebe of keeping two mansions side by side—one to live in, one to decorate over and over—seems admirably restrained.

centre round or around. 'Their argument centres around the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act' (The Times). Centre indicates a point, and a point cannot encircle anything. Make it 'centre on' or 'revolve around'.

I have long known that it is part of God's plan for me to spend a little time with each of the most stupid people on earth, and Mary Ellen was proof that even in the Appalachian woods I would not be spared.

In the United States alone, more than eighty million people suffer from cardiovascular disease, and the cost to the nation of treating heart disease has been put as high as $300 billion a year.

Lagniappe, usually attributed to the French of New Orleans, in fact originated among the Kechuan Indians of Peru as yapa. The Spanish adopted it as ñapa. The French then took it from the Spanish and we from the French.

To agree with Ingold is no to say that everything must be local first and last, nor to deny that there are environmental problems on a planetary scale. It is to say that they are not the planet's problems. They are ours.