Quotes from Bill Bryson

In 2001, the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology declared the G spot a "modern gynecologic myth

What a joy it is to arrive after dark at a snug-looking house, its windows filled with welcoming light, and know that it is yours and that inside is your family.

and all children everywhere go through a phase in which they become oddly fascinated with the idea of "gone" and "all gone.

You look at the modern humans that a lot of us have slept with and it is hardly a surprise if a Neanderthal maiden or two might have twinkled by the campfire light.

We all know that if we consume too much beer and cake and pizza and cheeseburgers and all the other things that make life frankly worth living, we will add pounds to our bodies because we have taken in too many calories. But what exactly are these little numerical oddments that are so keen to make us round and wobbly?

At the far end, a shop called the Boscombe Antique Market had a big sign in the window that said 'We Buy Anything!', which seemed an unusually generous offer, so I went inside, gobbed on the counter and barked, 'How much for that then?' I didn't, of course – it was shut – but I'd have liked to. It

I have eaten good food in unprepossessing locales, but I doubt the disparity between the crude, shabby atmosphere of that nameless cement-block dispensary of protein and redemption and the quality of the lunch laid on by the butcher of Zegota will ever be matched.

am not at all sure how we should tackle such a crisis, but on the basis of what we know so far, I would suggest, as a start, quarantining Texas. I

was just very compact, not much larger than a standard wardrobe. But it was a marvel of ergonomics. It included

About 15 percent of girls now begin puberty by age seven.

If you took all the young men in southern England with those caps and that slouch and collected them all together in one room, you still wouldn't have enough IQ points to make a halfwit.

But the polysemic champion must be set. Superficially it looks like a wholly unseeming monosyllable, the verbal equivalent of the single-celled organism. Yet it has 58 uses as a noun, 126 as a verb, and 10 as a participial adjective. Its meanings are so various and scattered that it takes the OED 60,000 words—the length of a short novel—to discuss them all.

Then these corpuscles are collected by scavenger cells and sent to the spleen for disposal. You discard about a hundred billion red blood cells every day. They are a big component of what makes your stools brown.

Bathroom is first noted in 1836, though toilet paper, intriguingly, isn't found before 1880.

The Danes are so full of joie de vivre that they practically sweat it. In a corner of Europe where the inhabitants have the most blunted concept of pleasure (in Norway, three people and a bottle of beer is a party; in Sweden, the national sport is suicide), the Danes' relaxed attitude to life is not so much refreshing as astonishing.

Tunney has all the makings of a hero – he was clean living, intelligent, polite, reasonably good-looking – but, like Lou Gehrig, he lacked the chemistry that stirred affection.

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.

At the turn of the century, New York had more speakers of German than anywhere in the world except Vienna and Berlin, more Irish than anywhere but Dublin, more Russians than in Kiev, more Italians than in Milan or Naples. In 1890 the United States had 800 German newspapers and as late as the outbreak of World War I Baltimore alone had four elementary schools teaching in German only.

he also engaged in many charitable works, notably the building of one of the world's largest orphanages for boys (and boys alone; orphan girls would have to look elsewhere)

85 percent of the 30,000 Anglo-Saxon words died out under the influence of the Danes and Normans. That means that only about 4,500 Old English words survived—about 1 percent of the total number of words in the Oxford English Dictionary. And yet those surviving words are among the most fundamental words in English: man, wife, child, brother, sister, live, fight, love, drink, sleep, eat, house, and so on.

A Midsummer Night's Dream remains an enchanting work after four hundred years, but few would argue that it cuts to the very heart of human behaviour. What it does do is take, and give, a positive satisfaction in the joyous possibilities of verbal expression.

Shakespeare] è una sorta di equivalente letterario dell'elettrone: è lì ma non è lì.

When Americans load up their cars and drive enormous distances to a setting of rare natural splendor what most of them want then they get there is to play a little miniature golf and eat dribbly food (p. 102).

It is a cherishable irony that a language that succeeded almost by stealth, treated for centuries as the inadequate and second-rate tongue of peasants, should one day become the most important and successful language in the world.