Quotes from Bill Bryson

Wenn wir ein Lebewesen damit beauftragen wollten, sich in der Einsamkeit des Kosmos um Lebendiges zu kümmern, zu überwachen, was daraus wird und wohin es geht, sollte man für diese Aufgabe keine Menschen auswählen.

Realizing they had no clear notion of how far it was from New York to Paris by the great circle route, they went to a public library and measured the distance on a globe with a piece of string. By such means was one of history's greatest planes built.

Run a finger along a dusty shelf, and you are in large part clearing a path through fragments of your former self. Silently and remorselessly we turn to dust.

hanged. 'It was disclosed that a young white official had been found hanged to death in his cell …' (The New York Times). 'Hanged to death' is redundant. So too, for that matter, are 'starved to death' and 'strangled to death'. The writer was correct, however, in saying that the official had been found hanged and not hung. People are hanged; pictures and the like are hung.

Quality of life, I decided, is my fourth point. There is something in the pace and scale of British life–an appreciation of small pleasures, a kind of restraint with respect to greed, generally speaking–that makes life strangely agreeable. The British really are the only people in the world who become genuinely enlivened when presented with a hot beverage and a small plain biscuit.

designed and built the world's first municipal park. This park so captivated the American landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted that he modeled Central Park in New York on it.

We had remained friends in a kind of theoretical sense, but our paths had diverged wildly.

was not so much how memory works as how difficult it is to understand how it works.

Today some 40 percent of us will discover we have cancer at some point in our lives. Many, many more will have it without knowing it and will die of something else first.

It takes a special kind of vigilance to make your way across a continent where people voluntarily ingest tongues, kidneys, horsemeat, frogs' legs, intestines, sausages made of congealed blood, and the brains of little cows.

Biologically, there is actually no such thing as race – nothing in terms of skin colour, facial features, hair type, bone structure, or anything else that is a defining quality among peoples. And yet look how many people have been enslaved or hated or lynched or deprived of fundamental rights through history because of the colour of their skin.

Vasco da Gama on a cruise to India and back encouraged his men to rinse their mouths with urine, which did nothing for their scurvy and can't have done much for their spirits either.

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.

The first was the news that if the great American swimmer Buster Crabbe, winner of the 1932 men's 400-meter freestyle, had swum in the present Olympic Games at the same pace he did in 1932 (and admittedly this would be asking a lot, as he has been dead for many years), he would have lost to Ian Thorpe by two full pool lengths. Isn't that amazing?

In the 1760s, a Scottish doctor named William Stark, evidently encouraged by Benjamin Franklin, conducted a series of patently foolhardy experiments in which he tried to identify the active agent by, somewhat bizarrely, depriving himself of it. For weeks he lived on only the most basic of foods—bread and water chiefly—to see what would happen. What happened was that in just over six months he killed himself, from scurvy, without coming to any helpful conclusions at all.

Until 1604 the age of consent was twelve for a girl, fourteen for a boy.

Flies are of course always irksome, but the Australian variety distinguishes itself with its very particular persistence. If an Australian fly wants to be up your nose or in your ear, there is no discouraging him. Flick at him as you will and each time he will jump out of range and come straight back. It is simply not possible to deter him.

What genes specifically do is provide instructions for building proteins. Most of the useful things in the body are proteins. Some speed up chemical changes and are known as enzymes. Others convey chemical messages and are known as hormones.

affinity denotes a mutual relationship. Therefore, strictly speaking, one should not speak of someone or something having an affinity for another, but rather should speak of an affinity with or between. When mutuality is not intended, 'sympathy' would be a better word. But it should also be noted that a number of authorities and many dictionaries no longer insist on this distinction.

The positive side of thinking you are about to die is that it does make you glad of the little life that is left to you.

We know also that she had three children with William Shakespeare—Susanna in May 1583 and the twins, Judith and Hamnet, in early February 1585—but all the rest is darkness. We know nothing about the couple's relationship—whether they bickered constantly or were eternally doting.

Some varieties of Smokies salamander haven't even evolved lungs. (They breathe through their skin.) Most salamanders are tiny, only an inch or two long, but the rare and startlingly ugly hellbender salamander can attain lengths of over two feet.

As late as 1930, America had 181,000 refrigerated railway cars, all cooled with ice.

In the first few days, I failed to distinguish between collar and color, khaki and car key, letters and lettuce, bed and bared, karma and calmer. Needing