Quotes from Bill Bryson

To a British crossword enthusiast, the clue "An important city in Czechoslovakia" instantly suggests Oslo. Why? Look at Czech(OSLO)vakia again. "A seed you put in the garage" is caraway, while "HIJKLMNO" is water because it is H-to-O or H2O

At last, some fourteen hundred years after the Romans withdrew, taking their hot baths, padded sofas, and central heating with them, the British were rediscovering the novel condition of being congenially situated.

The only really reliable way to transfer cold germs is physically by touch.

It is in all that complex synaptic entanglement that our intelligence lies, not in the number of neurons , as was once thought.

effects were horrific – Evans needed a kidney transplant and all members of the party suffered lasting damage – yet nothing in the taste alerted anyone to the perils

The main thing to bear in mind is that carbohydrate, upon being digested, is just more sugar – often quite a lot more. That means that a 150g serving of white rice or a small bowl of cornflakes will have the same effect on your blood glucose levels as nine teaspoons of sugar.

but I had reached the point where aches and blisters were so central a feature of my existence that I ceased to notice them.

Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments.

lifelong. 'Jesse Bishop was a lifelong drug addict who had spent 20 of his 46 years in prison' (Guardian). You might be a lifelong resident of New York or a lifelong church-goer or, at a stretch, a lifelong lover of music. But unless the unfortunate Mr Bishop had turned to drugs at a remarkably early age, lifelong is much too literal a word to describe his addiction.

A foreigner could be excused for thinking that to know set is to know English.

There are some things in life that just have to be faced up to, whether you want to or not.

DNA molecule, as you will almost certainly remember from countless television programs if not school biology, is made up of two strands, connected by rungs to form the celebrated twisted ladder known as a double helix. Your DNA is simply an instruction manual for making you. A length of DNA is divided into segments called chromosomes and shorter individual units called genes. The sum of all your genes is the genome.

One of the reasons the Mona Lisa looks enigmatic is that she has no eyebrows.

unstable plane for a day and a half through storm and cloud and darkness while intricately balancing the flow of fuel through five tanks governed by fourteen valves, and navigating his way across a void without landmarks. When he needed to check his position or log a note, he would have to spread his work out on his lap and hold the stick between his knees; if it was nighttime he would have to grip a small flashlight between his teeth.

Wow, look at all the places you can park," he said, as if for all these years he had been cruising endlessly, unable to terminate a journey.

The marriage license itself is lost, but a separate document, the marriage bond, survives. On it Anne Hathaway is correctly identified. Shakespeare's name is rendered as "Shagspere"—the first of many arrestingly variable renderings.

The question is important because if fever is a defense mechanism, then any effort to suppress or eliminate it may be counterproductive. Allowing a fever to run its course (within limits, needless to say) could be the wisest thing. An increase of only a degree or so in body temperature has been shown to slow the replication rate of viruses by a factor of two hundred—an astonishing increase in self-defense from only a very modest rise in warmth.

The problem was that I knew nothing like as much as I ought to know to work safely as a journalist in Britain, and I lived in constant fear that my employers would discover the full extent of my ignorance and send me back to Iowa.

The idea was to help women produce babies of genius by giving them the very best sperm modern science could provide. Some two hundred children were born as a result of the bank's efforts, though none, it seems, proved to be an outstanding genius or even an accomplished eyeglass engineer.

Incidentally, our standard image of servants in black uniforms with frilly caps, starched aprons and the like actually reflects a fairly short-lived reality. Servants' uniforms didn't become routine until the rise of cotton imports in the 1850s. Before then the quality of clothes worn by the upper classes was so instantly and visibly superior to that of the working classes that it wasn't necessary to distinguish servants with uniforms.

Even Christ reputedly made a pun when He said: "Thou art Peter: upon this rock I shall build my Church." It doesn't make a lot of sense from the wordplay point of view until you realize that in ancient Greek the word for Peter and for rock was the same.

New Hampshire is guys in hunting caps and pickup trucks with number plates bearing the feisty slogan 'Live Free or Die.

No one knows, because it is essentially impossible to determine, to what extent environmental factors contribute to cancers now. More than eighty thousand chemicals are produced commercially in the world today, and by one calculation 86 percent of them have never been tested for their effects on humans.

The answer is a complicated, dramatic one. I can tell you at once that nothing you touch today will have more bloodshed, suffering, and woe attached to it than the innocuous twin pillars of your salt and pepper set.