Quotes from Bill Bryson

I've never liked that man from the day Grace married him, and the fact he's become President of the United States makes no difference.

In another widely reported study, the Belly Button Biodiversity Project, conducted by researchers at North Carolina State University, sixty random Americans had their belly buttons swabbed to see what was lurking there microbially. The study found 2,368 species of bacteria, 1,458 of which were unknown to science. (That is an average of 24.3 new-to-science microbes in every navel.)

That is why, for instance, horses in New England (as in East Anglia) neigh, while those in the middle states of America (and the Midlands of England) whinny.

If surgeons know they are going to amputate a limb, they now often numb the nerves in the affected limb over a period of days beforehand to prepare the brain for the oncoming loss of feeling. The practice has been found to greatly reduce phantom limb pain.

The prostate, it must be said, produces seminal fluid throughout a man's adulthood and anxiety in his later years.

passed a public library and impulsively popped in to ask if they had any information on Centralia.

Consider just one of those stories that did make it into the New York Times in 1997, though buried away in the odd-sock drawer of Section C. In January of that year, according to a report written in America by a Times reporter, scientists were seriously investigating the possibility that a mysterious seismic disturbance in the remote Australian outback almost four years earlier had been a nuclear explosion set off by members of the Japanese doomsday cult Aum Shinrikyo.

Of the billions and billions of species of living things that have existed since the dawn of time, most—99.99 percent, it has been suggested—are no longer around. Life on Earth, you see, is not only brief but dismayingly tenuous. It is a curious feature of our existence that we come from a planet that is very good at promoting life but even better at extinguishing it.

It is an extraordinary fact but a true one that there are thousands of men in Britain who will never need Viagra as long as steam trains are in operation.

We have now reached a level in which many people are not merely unacquainted with the fundamentals of punctuation, but don't evidently realize that there are fundamentals.

Did all that really just happen or have I wandered into some kind of Dada exhibition?

For anyone of a rational disposition, fashion is often nearly impossible to fathom. Throughout many periods of history—perhaps most—it can seem as if the whole impulse of fashion has been to look maximally ridiculous. If one could be maximally uncomfortable as well, the triumph was all the greater.

In 1954, just one French residence in ten had a shower or bath.

Authorities seem to be universally agreed that the average quantity of semen released at orgasm is three to three and a half milliliters, about a teaspoonful, with an average spurt distance of eighteen to twenty centimeters, or seven to eight inches, though according to Desmond Morris, a launch of three feet has been scientifically recorded. It does not specify the circumstances.

I've never liked that man from the day Grace married him, and the fact he's become President of the United States makes no difference.' - Lemira Barrett Goodhue, mother-in-law of Calvin Coolidge

They owe this lavish abundance to the deep, loamy soils of their sheltered valleys, known locally as coves; to their warm, moist climate (which produces the natural bluish haze from which they get their name); and above all to the happy accident of the Appalachians' north—south orientation. During the last ice age, as glaciers and ice sheets spread down from the Arctic, northern flora all over the world naturally tried to escape southwards.

Each time you fly from North America to Australia, and without anyone asking how you feel about it, a day is taken away from you when you cross the international dateline.

All Australians are required by law to vote in federal elections, including residents of the Northern Territory.

He was taken to St. Lawrence Hospital and died the next day. He never regained consciousness.

At a minimum the name should puzzle foreigners—this is a basic requirement of most British institutions—and ideally it should excite long and inconclusive debate, defy all logical explanation, and evoke images that border on the surreal. Among

For minds and cogitation are, to Leibniz, the ultimate reality, and unless the minds have free will, they are not minds at all but physical mechanisms numbly obeying deterministic rules.

the cathedral-like Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II in Milan, which Mark Twain found so enchanting that he declared he would happily live in it for the rest of his life. It is still probably the most beautiful shopping center in the world.

This process of continual internal state-change is the cogitation that is the raison d'être of the monad and the fundamental process of the universe.

A lot of people conclude from this that the FBI and its agents are dangerously inept.