Quotes from Bill Bryson

When you put your hand on a hot plate, your Ruffini corpuscles cry out. Merkel cells respond to constant pressure, Pacinian corpuscles to vibration. Meissner's

Butlin had invented the prisoner-of-war camp as holiday, and, this being Britain, people loved it.

l'unica cosa speciale degli elementi che ci compongono è che ci compongono.

His private life was equally unorthodox in that he and another man shared the affections of a woman who had once been Baird's girlfriend, was now the second man's wife, and who found it impossible to choose between the two. In true British fashion, the arrangement to share was agreed between all three over a cup of tea.

As Mario Pei has noted, no two people in any language speak the same sounds in precisely the same way. That is of course what enables us to recognize a person by his voice. In short, we each have our own dialect.

extensor pollicis brevis, the flexor pollicis longus, and the first volar interosseous of Henle.* Working together, they allow us to grasp and manipulate tools with sureness and delicacy. You might never have heard of them, but these three small muscles are at the heart of human civilization. Take them away and our greatest collective achievement might be maneuvering ants out of their nests with sticks.

A new life has begun.

If you sell out to outsiders, you must accept that it will be people from other lands who decide what snacks you eat and where your sauces are concocted. And

The idea of personal space, which seems so natural to us now, was a revelation. People couldn't get enough of it. Soon it wasn't merely sufficient to live apart from one's inferiors; one had to have time apart from one's equals, too.

Was Hamlet a Man or a Woman?" and others of similarly inventive cast.

The drift of all this was that the British don't expect over-the-counter drugs to change their lives, whereas we Americans will settle for nothing less.

activity. Often a sign of prolixity, as here: 'The warnings followed a week of earthquake activity throughout the region' (Independent). Just make it 'a week of earthquakes'.

What it comes down to really is cancer is, appallingly, your own body doing its best to kill you. It is suicide without permission.

On the busiest day, October 7, almost 110,000 people were admitted. At one point, 92,000 were in the building at the same time—the largest number of people ever to be indoors in a single location to that time. Not every visitor was enchanted. William Morris, the future designer and aesthete, then aged seventeen, was so appalled by what he saw as the exhibition's lack of taste and veneration of excess that he staggered from the building and was sick in the bushes.

By Chicago standards, the election was peaceful. There were just two bombings, two shootings, two election officials beaten and kidnapped, and twelve declared cases of intimidation of voters.

Some aspects of language acquisition are puzzling: Children almost always learn to say no before yes and in before on, and all children everywhere go through a phase in which they become oddly fascinated with the idea of "gone" and "all gone.

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE WAS BORN into a world that was short of people and struggled to keep those it had. In 1564 England had a population of between three million and five million—much less than three hundred years earlier, when plague began to take a continuous, heavy

There is no evidence to suggest that Charles Lindbergh would ever have countenanced atrocities. But equally, when a person speaks of the world as having too many of one kind of person, is within hailing distance of those who do.

hiking was a tiring, dirty, pointless slog between distantly spaced comfort zones.

What is it about maps? I could look at them all day, intently studying the names of towns and villages I have never heard of and will never visit, tracing the course of obscure rivers, checking elevations, consulting the marginal notes to see what a little circle with a flag on it signifies and what's the difference between a pictogram of an airplane with a circle around it and one without, issuing small profound hmmmms and nodding my head gravely without having the faintest idea why.

Life appears to have been pretty good for the Skara Brae residents. They had jewelry and pottery. They grew wheat and barley, and enjoyed bounteous harvests of shellfish and fish, including a codfish that weighed seventy-five pounds. They kept cattle, sheep, pigs, and dogs. The one thing they lacked was wood.

antibiotics, the more opportunity they have to develop resistance. What you are left with after a course of antibiotics, after all, are the most resistant microbes. By attacking a broad spectrum of bacteria, you stimulate lots of defensive action. At the same time, you inflict unnecessary collateral damage. Antibiotics are about as nuanced as a hand grenade. They wipe out good microbes as well as bad. Increasing evidence shows that some of the good ones may never recover, to our permanent cost.

All that is required of you is a willingness to trudge.

So Whitney's gin not only helped make many people rich on both sides of the Atlantic but also reinvigorated slavery, turned child labor into a necessity, and paved the way for the American Civil War.