Quotes from Bill Bryson

the starling, which was brought to America by one Eugene Schieffelin, a wealthy German emigrant who had the odd, and in the case of starlings regrettable, idea that he should introduce to the American landscape all the birds mentioned in the writings of Shakespeare.

Last Breath: Cautionary Tales from the Limits of Human Endurance

Just sitting quietly, doing nothing at all, your brain churns through more information in thirty seconds than the Hubble Space Telescope has processed in thirty years.

Altogether it takes 7 billion billion billion (that's 7,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, or 7 octillion) atoms to make you.

There are 378,000 miles of roads in America's national forests. That may seem a meaningless figure, but look at it this way—it is eight times the total mileage of America's interstate highway system.

It has long been known that heart attacks are more common in the dead of night, and some authorities think the nightly change in blood pressure may somehow act as a trigger.

Sabine Baring-Gould wrote the hymn "Onward, Christian Soldiers" and, more unexpectedly, the first novel to feature a werewolf.

The Dunning-Kruger Effect is essentially being too stupid to appreciate how stupid you are. That sounds like a pretty good description of the world to me. So

One other enduring myth concerning water intake is the belief that caffeinated drinks are diuretics and make you pee out more than you have taken in. They may not be the most wholesome of options for liquid refreshment, but they do make a net contribution to your personal water balance.

I was about to say it was an awful place, but in fact, like most things connected with one's adolescence, it was wonderful and awful at the same time.

Part of the power of travel is that you stand a good chance of being hollowed out by it.

The British are surely the only people in the world who have made a culinary feature of boiled cartilage and phlegm.

Sadly, although the source of much enjoyment, Ginger the pig progressed from hunting and killing chickens to lambs and, after a stab at my mother's ankles, was banished to the freezer before she developed a taste for small children.

very should be made to pay its way in sentences. Too often it is used where it adds nothing to sense ('It was a very tragic death'), or is inserted in a futile effort to prop up a weak word that would be better replaced by something with more punch ('The play was very good').

Very little arrives (those asteroid impacts are few and far between), and only a whisper of gas escapes. Everything else must be endlessly recycled: and so it is. The rain becomes the ocean and the ocean becomes the rain, the mountains are ground down to cover the sea-floors with silt, ancient silts rise up to make new mountains.

If everybody else in the world became the size of Americans, it would be equivalent to adding one billion people to the world's population.

To help us deal better with this fractional lag, the brain does a truly extraordinary thing: it continuously forecasts what the world will be like a fifth of a second from now, and that is what it gives us as the present. That means that we never see the world as it is at this very instant, but rather as it will be a fraction of a moment in the future. We spend our whole lives, in other words, living in a world that doesn't quite exist yet.

If you are going to have a system of hereditary privilege, then surely you have to take what comes your way no matter how ponderous the poor fellow may be or how curious his taste in mistresses.

Blenheim Palace, home of the Dukes of Marlborough, whose achievements over the last eleven generations could be inscribed with a Sharpie on the side of a peanut.

So the history of household life isn't just a history of beds and sofas and kitchen stoves, as I had vaguely supposed it would be, but of scurvy and guano and the Eiffel Tower and bedbugs and body-snatching and just about everything else that has ever happened. Houses aren't refuges from history. They are where history ends up.

nostalgia such as can be known only by those who remember the days of hot metal typesetting and noisy composing rooms

Thirty-six years later the Dutchman Abel Tasman was sent to look for the fabled South Land and managed to sail 2,000 miles along the underside of Australia without detecting that a substantial land mass lay just over the left-hand horizon.

more than half of all first heart attacks (fatal or otherwise) occur in people who are fit and healthy and have no known obvious risks. They don't smoke or drink to excess, are not seriously overweight, and do not have chronically high blood pressure or even bad cholesterol readings, but they get a heart attack anyway. Living a virtuous life doesn't guarantee that you will escape heart problems; it just improves your chances.

certainly have some wonders yet to find.