Quotes from Bill Bryson

Goodness knows what the world is coming to when park rangers carry service revolvers.

You even quite often hear people speaking Welsh, whereas in Scotland the number of people who seriously speak Gaelic would barely fill a shower stall.

But astronomy is, quite genuinely, far simpler than the human sciences.

I suppose all our lives must be at the end of a long chain of improbable coincidences

Americans are five times more likely to asphyxiate while eating than Britons.

Electric jugs for all.

84 percent of chicken breasts, nearly 70 percent of ground beef, and getting on for half of pork chops contained intestinal E. coli, which is not good news for anything but the coli. *1

It is a myth, and physiological impossibility, incidentally, that hair and nails continue to grow after death. Nothing grows after death.

It has been calculated, and goodness knows how, it must be said, that during the course of a lifetime the heart does an amount of work sufficient a one ton object 150 miles into the air. It is a truly remarkable implement. It just doesn't care about your love life.

In 1586 Elizabeth ordered that Anthony Babington, a wealthy young Catholic who had plotted her assassination, should be made an example of. Babington was hauled down from the scaffold while still conscious and made to watch as his abdomen was sliced open and the contents allowed to spill out. It was by this time an act of such horrifying cruelty that it disgusted even the bloodthirsty crowd.

And there was this jerk named Dwayne who kept saying, 'Go on, have a beer. You know you want one. One little beer's not going to hurt ya. You haven't had a drink for three years. You can handle it.' He looked at me again. You know? I nodded. Caught me when I was vulnerable. You know, when I was still breathing.

Sir Thomas More came up with absurdity, acceptance, exact, explain, and exaggerate.

Right now, grazing in the divots on your head (and elsewhere on your oily surface, but above all on your head) are tiny mites called Demodex folliculorum

At very high altitudes, any exertion becomes difficult and exhausting. Around 40 percent of people experience altitude sickness above thirteen thousand feet, and it is impossible to predict who the victims will be because it is not related to fitness.

And actually, even normal temperature is pretty good at keeping microbes in check. Just look at how swiftly they swarm in and devour you when you die. That's because your lifeless body falls to a delicious come and get it temperature, like pie left to cool on a windowsill.

Henry Gosse, produced a somewhat desperate alternative theory called "prochronism" in which he suggested that God had merely made the Earth look old, to give people of inquisitive minds more interesting things to wonder over.

As a rough rule, I would suggest that a company's orthographic eccentricities should be noted, possibly even observed, but never overindulged. Just because a company chooses to put a backward letter into its title or to spell its name in small capitals does not entitle it to become a distraction in print.

People tend to blame the last thing they ate , but it's probably the thing before the last thing they ate.

Sharkey was from Boston, the son of Lithuanian immigrants who had endowed him with magnificent strength and a name that no one could spell. It was variously rendered in official records as Zuhauskay

was headed for Nebraska. Now there's a sentence you don't want to have to say too often if you can possibly help it. Nebraska must be the most unexciting of all the states. Compared with it, Iowa is paradise. Iowa at least is fertile and green and has a hill. Nebraska is like a 75,000-square-mile bare patch.

Nor, strictly speaking, is it correct to call them Puritans. They were Separatists, so called because they had left the Church of England. Puritans were those who remained in the Anglican Church but wished to purify it. They wouldn't arrive in America for another decade

Clergymen sometimes preached against the potato on the grounds that it nowhere appears in the Bible.

wondering how many tens of thousands of days have passed since BBC One last showed a program that anyone not on medication would want to watch.

People in Philadelphia don't come from there; they come from "Fuhluffia.