Quotes from Bill Bryson

Remarkably, even with all the improvements in care, you are 70 percent more likely to die from heart disease today than you were in 1900. That's partly because other things used to kill people first, and partly because a hundred years ago people didn't spend five or six hours an evening in front of a television with a big spoon and a tub of ice cream. Heart disease is far and away the Western world's number one killer.

Hobson's choice is sometimes taken to mean a dilemma or difficult decision, but in fact means no choice at all. It derives from a sixteenth-century Cambridge stable-keeper named Thomas Hobson, who hired out horses on a strict rotation. The customer was allowed to take the one nearest the stable door or none at all.

Ordination in the Church of England required a university degree, but most ministers read classics and didn't study divinity at all, and so had no training in how to preach, provide inspiration or solace, or otherwise offer meaningful Christian support

Bashfully I dropped my shirt onto the sand and stood naked but for my sagging trunks. Glenn, never having seen anything quite this grotesque and singular on an Australian beach, certainly nothing still alive, snatched up his camera and began excitedly taking close-up shots of my stomach. Bizeet, bizeet, bizeet, bizeet, his camera sang happily as he followed me into the surf.

certainty. The urge to switch from subjunctive to indicative is, to paraphrase Alastair Fowler, always a powerful

Webster was responsible also for the American aluminum in favor of the British aluminium. His choice has the fractional advantage of brevity, but defaults in terms of consistency.

Our ears are built for a quiet world. Evolution did not foresee that one day humans would insert plastic buds in their ears and subject their eardrums to a hundred decibels of melodic roar across a span of millimeters.

I only have one wrinkle and I'm sitting on it.

I have a small, tattered clipping that I sometimes carry with me and pull out for purposes of private amusement. It's a weather forecast from the Western Daily Mail and it says, in toto, "Outlook: Dry and warm, but cooler with some rain.

You shall be led from hence to the place whence you came…and your body shall be opened, your heart and bowels plucked out, and your privy members cut off and thrown into the fire before your eyes.

I can remember when you couldn't buy a British Rail sandwich without wondering if this was your last act before a long period on a life-support machine.

zippy new tax called VAT, which was to be introduced a week or so later. The gist of the advertisement was that while some things would go up in price with VAT, some things would also go down. (Ha!) I

There are thousands of things that can kill us—slightly more than eight thousand, according to the International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems compiled by the World Health Organization—and we escape every one of them but one.

E Pluribus Unum, "One from Many," was taken from, of all places, a recipe for salad in an early poem by Virgil.)

to underscore the agreeably retro nature of the driving experience in Australia, I began to discover that radio stations in country towns specialize in songs from yesteryear. I don't mean songs from the sixties and seventies, but much earlier. This may be the last country in the world where you can turn on a car radio and stand a more than passing chance of hearing Peggy Lee

Miraculously, Pitka survived. "I don't know why I set that durn gun against the tree," he said later. (Actually, what he said was, "Mrffff mmmpg nnnmmm mffffffn," on account of having no lips, teeth, nose, tongue, or other vocal apparatus.)

he made Widecombe-in-the-Moor sound awfully pretty and I was curious to see to what extent it remained so. I am happy to say it is still a gorgeous place. It has a lovely church with a magnificent tower, a green, a pub, and a shop, and stands amid a symphony of rocky hills.

Where body meets air, we are all cadavers.

Children do much better with extreme cold than with extreme heat. Because their sweat glands aren't fully developed, they don't sweat freely as adults do.

replica. Properly, a replica is an exact copy, built to the same scale as the original and using the same materials. To use the word when you might better use 'model', 'miniature', 'copy' or 'reproduction' devalues it, as here: 'Using nothing but plastic Lego toy bricks, they have painstakingly reconstructed replicas of some of the world's most famous landmarks' (Sunday Times).

It may seem topsy-turvy that cosmologists can speak confidently about galaxies billions of light years away, whereas theories of diet and child rearing – issues that everyone cares about – are still tentative and controversial

Food was similarly regulated, with restrictions placed on how many courses one might eat, depending on status.

The AT is no longer the longest hiking trail—the Pacific Crest and Continental Divide trails, both out West, are slightly longer—but it will always be the first and greatest. It has a lot of friends. It deserves them.

A study in Switzerland in 2008 found that flu virus can survive on paper money for two and a half weeks if it is accompanied by a microdot of snot.