Quotes from Bill Bryson

It is extraordinary to think that before he settled in London and became celebrated as a playwright, history provides just four recorded glimpses of Shakespeare—at his baptism, his wedding, and the two births of his children.

In America, alas, beauty has become something you drive to, and nature an either/or proposition—either you ruthlessly subjugate it...or you deify it, treat it as something holy and remote...Seldom would it occur...that people and nature could coexist to their mutual benefit... (p. 200).

while—for a couple of minutes—it's actually

relapses weeks or months later. As usual nothing about the outbreak fit into a logical pattern, and all tests for bacterial or viral agents came back

Every time you breathe, you exhale some 25 sextillion (that's 2.5 x 1022) molecules of oxygen—so many that with a day's breathing you will in all likelihood inhale at least one molecule from the breaths of every person who has ever lived.

I have been mistaken many times for Jane Torvill, on the ice and off.

was interested to see that two bouquets had been laid on the lid, so someone must miss her. A couple of other mourners, lacking flowers, had left empty crisp packets, bless them, while someone else had placed an empty can of Carlsberg lager on the grave of a man named Duckett

It's easy to make bricks, but making houses requires far more than throwing a pile of bricks in the air.

There are 378,000 miles of roads in America's national forests. That may seem a meaningless figure, but look at it this way—it is eight times the total mileage of America's interstate highway system. It is the largest road system in the world

Look at Starbucks and their cup sizes—Venti, Trenta, and Wanko Grande or

complex, but the real problem was filling them

Since 2008, 150 local papers have closed in England, including some once major ones like the Surrey Herald and Reading Post. That's not good. Without local newspapers there's no one to tell you when somebody's been fined for having rats in their kitchens.

The woman who engaged him had no idea that her gardener was one of the most distinguished scientists in Britain until a friend came for tea one day and, looking out the window, casually asked: "My dear, why is the Nobel laureate Sir Lawrence Bragg pruning your hedges?" Late

Più che per qualsiasi altro scrittore, in Shakespeare le parole sono separate dalla vita. Era un uomo così bravo a nascondere ciò che provava che non possiamo nemmeno essere sicuri che provasse qualcosa. Sappiamo che usava le parole con enorme efficacia, e possiamo ragionevolmente supporre che avesse dei sentimenti. Quello che non sappiamo, e che possiamo soltanto tirare a indovinare, è dove le due cose si intersecavano.

It is entirely possible that some terrestrial microbes are the products of different biogenesis events, in effect 'alien organisms', constituting a type of shadow biosphere

Women are much better than men in tactile sensitivity with their fingers, but possibly only because they have smaller hands and, therefore, a denser network of receptors.

La casa natale di Shakespeare, se non altro, sfuggì destino preparatogli dall'impresario P.T. Barnum, che negli anni Quaranta dell'Ottocento ebbe l'idea di spedirla negli Stati Uniti, montarla su ruote e mandarla in perpetua tournée per il Paese - prospettiva talmente allarmante che in Gran Bretagna ci si affrettò a raccogliere fondi per salvarla e trasformarla in museo e santuario.

Give them a form of transportation that was becoming obsolete in the time of Clement Attlee and they will flock to

The universal tree of life on Earth might actually be a forest.

It is true that William Shakespeare used some learned parlance in his work, but he also employed imagery that clearly and ringingly reflected a rural background. Jonathan Bate quotes a couplet from Cymbeline, "Golden lads and girls all must, / As chimney sweepers, come to dust," which takes on additional sense when one realizes that in Warwickshire in the sixteenth century a flowering dandelion was a golden lad, while one about to disperse its seeds was a chimney sweeper.

On this trip as we drove across Pennsylvania, a state so ludicrously vast that it takes a whole day to traverse

cuticles), Vick's Vapo Rub, Geritol, Serutan ('Natures spelled

The few surviving photographs of Childe certainly confirm that he was no beauty—he was skinny and chinless, with squinting eyes behind owlish spectacles, and a mustache that looked as if it might at any moment stir to life and crawl away—but whatever unkind things people might say about the outside of his head, the inside was a place of golden splendor.

These actions have arcane names like braking, retting, swingling (or scutching), and hackling or heckling, but essentially they involve pounding, stripping, soaking, and otherwise separating the pliant inner fiber, or bast, from its woodier stem. It is striking to think that when we heckle a speaker today we use a term that recalls the preparation of flax from the early Middle Ages.