Quotes from Bill Bryson

but it is a fact that men who have been castrated live about as long as women do.

Nothing—really, absolutely nothing—says more about Victorian Britain and its capacity for brilliance than that the century's most daring and iconic building was entrusted to a gardener.

small rise. And then we were alone with our packs in an

fly signifies an annoying insect, a means of travel, and a critical part of a gentleman's apparel is clearly asking to be mangled.

The first pacemaker was about the size of a pack of cigarettes. Today's are no bigger than one American quarter and can last up to ten years.

This is a disease for the person who wants to experience it all.

Until as late as the early 1950s a round-trip aeroplane ticket from Australia to England cost as much as a three-bedroom suburban home in Melbourne or Sydney.

I read once that the furthest distance the average American will walk without getting into a car is six hundred feet, and I fear the modern British have become much the same, except that on the way back to the car the British will drop some litter and get a tattoo.

And running—serious, dogged, long-distance running—is the one thing we do superlatively well.

as in the Old English word burh (place), which became variously burgh as in Edinburgh, borough as in Gainsborough, brough as in Middlesbrough, and bury as in Canterbury.

In a sense William Shakespeare's greatest achievement in life wasn't writing Hamlet or the sonnets but just surviving his first year.

The most remarkable part of all is your DNA (or deoxyribonucleic acid). You have a meter of it packed into every cell, and so many cells that if you formed all the DNA in your body into a single strand, it would stretch ten billion miles, to beyond Pluto.

If there is one thing certain about English pronunciation it is that there is almost nothing certain about it. No other language in the world has more words spelled the same way and yet pronounced differently.

Yet in clean Hong Kong asthma rates are 15 percent, while in heavily polluted Guangzhou they are just 3 percent, exactly the opposite of what one would expect.

The one word that Newfoundland has given the world is penguin. No one has any idea what inspired it.

Where the British will say howjado for "how do you do," an American will say jeetjet for "have you taken sustenance recently?" and lesskweet for "in that case, let us retire to a convivial place for a spot of refreshment.

He had a curiously stunted sense of humor and loved practical jokes that veered dangerously close to cruelty. Once on a hot day he filled a friend's water jug with kerosene and mirthfully stood by as the friend took a mighty swig. The friend ended up in the hospital.

A woman endows all her children with her mitochondria, but only her daughters have the mechanism to pass it onward to future generations.

HAD TO GO to America for a while to give some talks. Going to America always does me good. It's where I'm from, after all. There's baseball on the TV, people are friendly and upbeat, they don't obsess about the weather except when there is weather worth obsessing about, you can have all the ice cubes you want. Above all, visiting America gives me perspective. Consider

meat was any food (the sense is preserved in "meat and drink" and in the English food mincemeat, which contains various fruits but no meat in the sense that we now use it).

There is perhaps a kind of strange double comfort in knowing that you will almost certainly never lose your uvula but that it wouldn't matter too much anyway if you did.

The most expensive of all was verdigris, which was made by hanging copper strips over a vat of horse dung and vinegar and then scraping off the oxidized copper that resulted. It is the same process that turns copper domes and statues green – just quicker and more commercial – and it made 'the delicatest Grass-green in the world', as one eighteenth-century admirer enthused. A room painted in verdigris always produced an appreciative 'ah' in visitors.

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.

Life in Australia would go on and I would hear nothing, because once you leave Australia, Australia ceases to be. What a strange, sad thought that is.