Quotes from Bill Bryson

Cancer may be a common cause of death, but it is not a common event in life.

Above all, the adoption of a narrower pelvis to accommodate our new gait brought a huge amount of pain and danger to women in childbirth. Until recent times, no other animal on Earth was more likely to die in childbirth than a human, and perhaps none even now suffers as much. —

I am a little dubious about this myself because I think that if you give anyone anywhere an extra twenty minutes, they will just have a cup of coffee. It's what you and I would do. It's what anyone does with twenty minutes.

You are the product of three billion years of evolutionary tweaks.

there any evidence that Henry ever uttered the other famous remark attributed to him: "I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death." Indeed, there is no evidence that Henry ever said anything of substance or found space in his head for a single original thought. He

and that's you gone, but it was good while it lasted.

The hard and unexpected part is the realization not just that my son is not here but that the boy he was is gone forever. I would give anything to have them both back. But of course that cannot be. Life moves on. Kids grow up and move away, and if you don't know this already, believe me, it happens faster than you can imagine.

Nuestro cerebro es nosotros. Todo lo demás son solo tuberías y andamios.

Ninety percent of people who lose smell through head injury never get the sense back; a smaller proportion, about 70 percent, who lose smell through infections suffer permanent loss.

in Oxford the Reverend William Buckland wrote the first scientific description of dinosaurs and, not incidentally, became the world's leading authority on coprolites—fossilized feces.

Hitler and Mussolini even went so far as to persecute Esperanto speakers.

With his Gallic charm and chestful of medals, Nungesser proved irresistible to women and in the spring of 1923 after a whirlwind romance, he became engaged to a young New York socialite with the unimprovably glorious name of Consuelo Hatmaker.

Sometimes the pronunciation changed, as between bath and bathe and as with the "s" in house becoming a "z" in houses. And sometimes, to the eternal confusion of non-English speakers, these things happened all together, so that we have not only the spelling doublet life/lives but also the pronunciation doublet "l?ves" and "l?ves" as in "a cat with nine lives lives next door.

All kinds of people have completed thru-hikes. One man hiked it in his eighties. Another did it on crutches. A blind man named Bill Irwin hiked the trail with a seeing-eye dog, falling down an estimated 5,000 times in the process. Probably the most famous, certainly the most written about, of all thru-hikers was Emma Grandma Gatewood, who successfully hiked the trail twice in her late sixties despite being eccentric, poorly equipped, and a danger to herself. (She was forever getting lost.)

However tall it grows, a tree is just a few pounds of living cells thinly spread between roots and leaves.

Despite this, angioplasties remain extremely popular.

Skin flakes are properly called squamae (meaning "scales").

The very first hotel in the world to offer a bath for every bedroom was the Mount Vernon Hotel in the resort community of Cape May, New Jersey.

Beulah has a husband?" "I know. It's a miracle. There can't be more than two people on the planet who'd be willing to sleep with her and here we are both in the same town.

It was a haven, a little island of light in the darkness of the downtown, very like the diner in Edward Hopper's painting 'The Nighthawks'.

If a breeze plays lightly on your cheek, it is your Meissner's corpuscles that let you know.*

And what a joy it is to walk in it. England and Wales have 130,000 miles of public footpaths, about 2.2 miles of path for every square mile of area.

Thanks to this ruling, states now had the right to perform surgery on healthy citizens against their will—a liberty never before extended in any advanced country. Yet the case attracted almost no attention.

That is the most extraordinary fact about Britain. It wants to be a garden. Flowers bloom in the unlikeliest places–on railway sidings and waste grounds where there is nothing beneath them but rubble and grit. You even see clumps of flowery life growing on the sides of abandoned warehouses and old viaducts. If all the humans in the UK vanished tomorrow, Britain would still be in flower.