Quotes from Bill Bryson

Kisumu has the distinction of being the poorest city in Kenya. Almost half the people live on fifty cents a day or less.

Among them: one fell swoop, vanish into thin air, bag and baggage, play fast and loose, go down the primrose path, be in a pickle, budge an inch, the milk of human kindness, more sinned against than sinning, remembrance of things past, beggar all description, cold comfort, to thine own self be true, more in sorrow than in anger, the wish is father to the thought, salad days, flesh and blood, foul play, tower of strength, be cruel to be kind, blinking idiot, with bated breath

The unfortunate bottom line is that breast cancer screening doesn't save a lot of lives. For every thousand women screened, four will die of breast cancer anyway (either because the cancer was missed or because it was too aggressive to be treated successfully). For every thousand women who are not screened, five will die of breast cancer. So screening saves one life in every thousand.

Aborigines have the oldest continuously maintained culture on earth, and their art goes back to the very roots of it. Imagine if there were some people in France who could take you to the caves at Lascaux and explain in detail the significance of the paintings—

Childe would almost certainly have been fascinated with Çatalhöyük because almost nothing about the place made sense.

This is the worst characteristic of the Germans. Well, actually a predilection for starting land wars in Europe is their worst characteristic, but this is right up there with it.

From this I think we can conclude that the definitive English holorime has yet to be written. However, an old children's riddle does seem to come close. It is the one that poses the question How do you prove in three steps that a sheet of paper is a lazy dog? The answer: (1) a sheet of paper is an ink-lined plane; (2) an inclined plane is a slope up; (3) a slow pup is a lazy dog.

It was made completely of cast iron except for doors and floorboards—a design that would have given it all the charm and comfort of a cooking pot.

Think of it: there is enough of you to leave the solar system. You are in the most literal sense cosmic.

It is a challenge to believe that there was ever a time that airline food was exciting, when stewardesses were happy to see you, when flying was such an occasion that you wore your finest clothes.

head over heels is not just a cliché; it is also, when you think about it, a faintly absurd one. Our heads are usually over our heels.

I had never really stopped to consider what an extraordinary thing the Royal National Lifeboat Institution is. Think about it. A troubled ship calls for help, and eight people—teachers, plumbers, the guy who runs the pub—drop everything and put to sea, whatever the weather, asking no questions, to try to help strangers. Is there anything more brave and noble than that?

I didn't ask for twenty quarter-pound cheeseburgers, I asked for four quarter-pound cheeseburgers five times." "Same thing," he said. "It's not the same thing at all. You can't be this stupid." Two

THE MOST POWERFUL impression you get in a dissecting room is that the human body is not a wondrous piece of precision engineering. It's meat.

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.

People read more. It is no coincidence that the mid-nineteenth century saw a sudden and lasting boom in newspapers, magazines, books, and sheet music. The number of newspapers and periodicals in Britain leaped from fewer than 150 at the start of the century to almost 5,000 by the end of it.

professor and surgeon named Ben Ollivere (about whom much more in due course) gently incised and peeled back a sliver of skin about a millimeter thick from the arm of a cadaver. It was so thin as to be translucent. "That," he said, "is where all your skin color is. That's all that race is—a sliver of epidermis.

The price paid was £700 – which historians are always obliged to qualify with the phrase 'a considerable amount of money in those days'. However, no price is relevant when the prize is priceless.

though I confess a certain fondness for the old-style Wimpy's with their odd sense of what constituted American food, as if they had compiled their recipes from a garbled telex).

Curiously, among the few survivors from this culinary onslaught is one that is most difficult to understand: the fish knife. Though it remains the standard instrument for dealing with fish of all kinds, no one has ever identified a single advantage conferred by its odd scalloped shape or worked out the original thinking behind it. There isn't a single kind of fish that it cuts better or bones more delicately than a conventional knife does.

nemesis. 'Instead, the unions directed their wrath toward another nemesis, the European Community's Executive Commission …' (Time magazine). A nemesis (from Nemesis, the Greek goddess of vengeance) is not merely a rival or traditional enemy, but one who extracts retributive justice or is utterly unbeatable.

Tarka the otter

As the Bhagavad Gita says, 'There never was a time when I was not . . . there will never be a time when I will cease to be.' Since time and space began together – as both St Augustine and the big bang attest – the Bhagavad Gita has a point. The chicken and the egg arrived at the same time.

Consider that in Britain the Royal Mail delivers the post, not the mail, while in America the Postal Service delivers the mail, not the post. These