Quotes from Bill Bryson

No country has given the world more incomparable literature per head of population than Ireland, and for that reason alone we might be excused a small, selfish celebration that English was the language of her greatest writers.

It is right to give Thomas Edison the credit for much of this, so long as we remember that his genius was not in creating electric light, but in creating methods of producing and supplying it on a grand commercial scale, which was actually a much larger and far more challenging ambition. It was also a vastly more lucrative one.

as horripilation but more commonly as getting goose bumps. In furry mammals, it adds a useful layer of insulating air between the hair and the skin, but in humans it has absolutely no physiological benefit and merely reminds us how comparatively bald we are. Horripilation also makes mammalian hair stand up (to make animals look bigger and more ferocious), which is why we get goose bumps when we are frightened or on edge, but of course that doesn't work very well for humans either.

Resuming installation process. Do not ever try anything like that again. Remember: we know that you spent a whole afternoon on March 10 watching Paris Hilton home videos. We'll tell your wife. We're Microsoft. Don't fuck with us. Download will be complete in 14 hours.

The 1920s was a great time for reading altogether—very possibly the peak decade for reading in American life.

Nether Hambleton and Middle Hambleton

Run a finger along a dusty shelf, and you are in large part clearing a path through fragments of your former self.

The worst imposition of all was to be instructed to take on some costly, long-standing obligation to the crown. Such was the fate of Bess of Hardwick's husband, the sixth Lord Shrewsbury. For sixteen years he was required to act as jailer to Mary, Queen of Scots, which in effect meant maintaining the court of a small, fantastically disloyal state in his own home.

I turned to my own bunk and examined it with a kind of appalled fascination. If the mattress stains were anything to go by, a previous user had not so much suffered from incontinence as rejoiced in it. He had evidently included the pillow in his celebrations

we now know that most viruses infect only bacterial cells and have no effect on us at all. Of the hundreds of thousands of viruses reasonably supposed to exist, just 586 species are known to infect mammals, and of these only 263 affect humans.

Now this little gal isn't much of a singer," she would say. "She learned singing by a correspondence course, and she missed a coupla lessons, but she's the nicest little gal in the whole show, so I want ya to give her a big hand.

Indeed, as he increasingly masters his native tongue, he tries to make it conform to more logical rules than the language itself may possess, saying "buyed," "eated," and "goed" because, even though he has never heard such words spoken, they seem more logical to him—as indeed they are, if you stopped and thinked about it.

It is a strange, nonintuitive fact of existence that photons of light have no color, sound waves no sound, olfactory molecules no odors.

But then, I suppose, that is the thing about the internet. It is just an accumulation of digital information, with no brains and no feelings – just like an IT person, in fact.

A person who smokes cigarettes regularly (about a pack a day) is fifty times more likely than a nonsmoker to get cancer. In

She would only make me take my seat if I didn't act calm and Swiss about it all.

Similarly, no one has ever come close to explaining why our fingers wrinkle when we have long baths. The explanation most often given is that wrinkling helps them to drain water better and improves grip. But that doesn't really make a great deal of sense. Surely the people who most urgently need a good grip are those who have just fallen in water, not those who have been in it for some time.

It is curious to reflect that we have computers that can effortlessly compute pi to 5,000 places and yet cannot be made to understand that there is a difference between time flies like an arrow and fruit flies like a banana or that in the English-speaking world to make up a story, to make up one's face, and to make up after a fight are all quite separate things.

The only really reliable way to transfer cold germs is physically by touch. A survey of subway trains in Boston found that metal poles are a fairly hostile environment for microbes. Where microbes thrive is in the fabrics on seats and on plastic handgrips. The most efficient method of transfer for germs, it seems, is a combination of folding money and nasal mucus.

the slight evolutionary change that pushed man's larynx deeper into his throat, and thus made choking a possibility, also brought with it the possibility of sophisticated, well-articulated speech.

They knew there was something there – possibly a biggish island like New Guinea, possibly a mass of smaller islands like the East Indies – and they called this amorphous entity New Holland, but none equated it with the long-sought southern continent.

There is energy of all sorts flowing through our world; it is not hard to imagine new ways in which that energy can do the work of humanity, new ways to align our needs and the planet's behaviours.

Before the shift house was pronounced "hoose" (it still is in Scotland), mode was pronounced "mood," and home rhymed with "gloom," which is why Domesday Book is pronounced and sometimes called Doomsday. (The word has nothing to do with the modern word doom, incidentally. It is related to the domes- in domestic.)

Candida albicans, the fungus behind thrush, until the 1950s was found only in the mouth and genitals, but now it sometimes invades the deeper body, where it can grow on the heart and other organs, like mold on fruit.