Quotes from Bill Bryson

the favourite activity is drinking a lot of beer and the second is throwing it up again)

Facing disaster, the committee did what committees in desperate circumstances sometimes do: it commissioned another committee with a better title.

To this day, I remain impressed by the ability of Britons of all ages and social backgrounds to get genuinely excited by the prospect of a hot beverage.

As Jablonski has written, "The loss of most of our body hair and the gain of the ability to dissipate excess body heat through eccrine sweating helped to make possible the dramatic enlargement of our most temperature-sensitive organ, the brain." That, she says, is how sweat helped to make you brainy.

In Baltimore (pronounced Balamer), an eagle is an "iggle," a tiger is a "tagger," water is "wooder," a power mower is a "paramour," a store is a "stewer," clothes are "clays," orange juice is "arnjoos," a bureau is a "beero," and the Orals are of course the local baseball team.

Similarly, unless you heard them spoken, you might not instantly recognize ajskrym, muving pikceris, and peda as the Polish for ice cream

The one positive to come out of the experience is that opioid fatalities have led to a rise in organ donations.16 In 2000, according to the Washington Post, fewer than 150 organ donors were opioid addicts; today the number is over 3,500.

a taxing slog for an old puffed-out flubba-wubba like me, but worth it for the view, which was sensational—like being on top of the world.

Bradford hat die Rolle seines Lebens darin gefunden, jeden anderen Ort auf diesem Planeten im Vergleich besser abschneiden zu lassen, und es spielt sie sehr gut.

with all the spirit and playfulness of an abattoir

It is one of the felicities of English that we can take pieces of words from all over and fuse them into new constructions—like trusteeship, which consists of a Nordic stem (trust), combined with a French affix (ee), married to an Old English root (ship). Other languages cannot do this. We should be proud of ourselves for our ingenuity and yet even now authorities commonly attack almost any new construction as ugly or barbaric.

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.

Edison was good at making things the world didn't yet have but terrible at seeing how it would choose to make use of them.

Goodness knows what this is meant to suggest—I suppose that this is some sort of Hall of the People—but the effect is that it looks as if two dozen citizens of various ages are about to commit mass suicide.

second largest and other similar comparisons often lead writers astray: 'Japan is the second largest drugs market in the world after the United States' (The Times). Not quite. It is the largest drugs market in the world after the United States or it is the second largest drugs market in the world. The sentence above could be fixed by placing a comma after 'world'.

How is it possible, in this wondrous land where the relics of genius and enterprise confront you at every step, where every realm of human possibility has been probed and challenged and meticulously extended, where many of the very greatest accomplishments of industry, commerce, and the arts find their seat—how is it possible in such a place that when at length I returned to my hotel and switched on the television, it was Cagney & Lacey again?

Twenty years after Waksman's death, the American Society for Microbiology made a somewhat belated attempt at amends by inviting Schatz to address the society on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of streptomycin's discovery. In recognition of his achievements, and presumably without giving the matter a lot of thought, it bestowed on him its highest award: the Selman A. Waksman medal. Life sometimes really is very unfair.

There was something so marvelously innocent, so irretrievably lost, about the world back then. You could see it in the easy, confident gait and sun-drenched smiles of the vacationers in every photograph. These people were happy. I don't mean they were happy. They were happy. They were living at a good time in a lucky country and they knew it. They had good jobs, good homes, good families, good prospects, good vacations in cheerful, sunny places.

Cancer is the price we pay for evolution.

No doubt the reason hopefully is not allowed is that somebody at The New York Times once had a boss who wouldn't allow it because his professor had forbidden it, because his father thought it was ugly and inelegant, because he had been told so by his uncle who was a man of great learning . . . ?and so on.

Tokyo: "When a passenger of the foot heave in sight, tootle the horn. Trumpet at him melodiously at first, but if he still obstacles your passage, then tootle him with vigor.

Not less than two hours a day should be devoted to exercise and the weather should be little regarded. If the body be feeble, the mind will not be strong. —thomas jefferson

exercise produces extraordinary benefits. Going for regular walks reduces the risk of heart attack or stroke by 31 percent. An analysis of 655,000 people in 2012 found that being active for just eleven minutes a day after the age of forty yielded 1.8 years of added life expectancy. Being active for an hour or more a day improved life expectancy by 4.2 years.

The main thing to bear in mind is that carbohydrate, upon being digested, is just more sugar – often quite a lot more. That means that a 150g serving of white rice or a small bowl of cornflakes will have the same effect on your blood glucose levels as nine teaspoons of sugar.14