Quotes from Bill Bryson

Jane Jacobs cites it in her landmark work of 1969, The Economy of Cities)

In short, and as always, a devoted reader can find support for nearly any position he or she wishes in Shakespeare. (Or, as Shakespeare himself put it in a much misquoted line: The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose.)

Vince was notorious. He would easily have been the world's most terrifying human had he but been human. I don't know quite what he was, other than it was five feet six inches of wiry malevolence in a grubby T-shirt. Reliable rumor had it that he had not been born, but burst fully formed from his mother's belly and then skittered off to the sewers.

if we wished to find a modern-day model for British and American speech of the late eighteenth century, we could probably do no better than Yosemite Sam.

Personally I can think of nothing more exciting—certainly nothing you could do in a public place with a cup of coffee—than to read newspapers from a part of the world you know almost nothing about.

Does anyone really need 50 percent more of plenty? The

In the United States, melatonin is commonly taken as a treatment for jet lag or insomnia. It is, as James Hamblin has written, "one of the very few hormones that you can purchase in the United States without a prescription. It is considered a dietary supplement and therefore held to essentially no premarket standards of quality, safety, or efficacy.

Thomas Chippendale. His influence was enormous. He was the first commoner for whom a furniture style was named;

Bacon's dichotomy is still germane today: a former President of the Royal Society, George Porter, encapsulated it by the maxim 'there are two kinds of science, applied and not yet applied'.

In other words , according to the McMaster study, too little salt is at least as risky as too much.

As recently as the eighteenth century, England happily installed a German king, George I, even though he spoke not a word of English and reigned for thirteen years without mastering his subjects' language. Common people did not expect to speak like their masters any more than they expected to live like them.

The belief that and should not be used to begin a sentence is without foundation. And that's all there is to it.

He agreed with Laughlin that sterilization was necessary in society "to prevent our being swamped with incompetence." Then he gave his solution: "It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes.

The U.S. Army in 1974 devised a food called funistrada as a test word during a survey of soldiers' dietary preferences. Although no such food existed, funistrada ranked higher in the survey than lima beans and eggplant (which seems about right to me, at least as far as the lima beans go).

contagious, infectious. Diseases spread by contact are contagious. Those spread by air and water are infectious. Used figuratively ('contagious laughter', 'infectious enthusiasm'), either is all right.

They were, in short, dangerously unprepared for the rigors ahead, and they demonstrated their incompetence in the most dramatic possible way: by dying in droves. Six

He had a boyish enthusiasm for warfare and was delighted beyond words to be made a colonel in the Illinois National Guard without ever having done anything to merit it other than to exist as a rich person.

all intents and purposes is colourless, redundant and hackneyed. Almost any other expression would be an improvement. 'He is, to all intents and purposes, king of the island' (Mail on Sunday) would be instantly made better by changing the central phrase to 'in effect' or removing it altogether. If the phrase must be used at all, it can always be shorn of the last two words. 'To all intents' says as much as 'to all intents and purposes'.

And thus I was to be found, in the first week of June, standing on the banks of the Shenandoah again, in Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, blinking at a grey sky and trying to pretend that with all my heart this was where I wanted to be.

Well, they seem to have that light in Australia nearly all the time. It took me a while to recognize that this was precisely the light of Iowa summers from my boyhood, and it was a shock to realize just how long it had been since I had seen it.

or unusually low.

When a prominent Puritan named (all too appropriately, it would seem) John Stubbs criticized the queen's mooted marriage to a French Catholic, the Duke of Alençon, his right hand was cut off.*

I might not be the first person in history to touch both ends of the Bryson Line, but I was certainly the first to do it and know he had done it. So

interesting? And here's another interesting fact, which I didn't tell you about earlier because I've been saving it: Wyatt Earp was from Pella, the little Iowa town with the windmills. Isn't that great?