Quotes from Bill Bryson

In a popular book of 1899, What a Young Woman Ought to Know, Mary Wood-Allen, an American doctor and social reformer, told women that they could engage in conjugal relations within marriage so long as it was done "without a particle of sexual desire.

Magazines boomed, too. Advertising revenues leaped 500 percent in the decade, and many publications of lasting importance made their debut: Reader's Digest in 1922, Time in 1923, the American Mercury and Smart Set in 1924, The New Yorker in 1925. Time was perhaps the most immediately influential

Australia is just so full of surprises.

Above all, the 1920s was a golden age for newspapers. Newspaper sales in the decade rose by about a fifth, to 36 million copies a day—or 1.4 newspapers for every household. New York City alone had twelve daily papers, and almost all other cities worthy of the name had at least two or three.

Hemoglobin has one strange and dangerous quirk: it vastly prefers carbon monoxide to oxygen. If carbon monoxide is present, hemoglobin will pack it in, like passengers on a rush-hour train, and leave the oxygen on the platform. That's why it kills people.

paradise for people who look as if they have just stepped out of a Barbour catalogue.

A sign by the highway said DON'T LITTER, KEEP ALABAMA THE BEAUTIFUL. 'OK, I the will,' I replied cheerfully

Only Brunel had experience with large-scale projects. He was indubitably a genius but an unnerving one, as it nearly always took epic infusions of time and cash to find a point of intersection between his soaring visions and an achievable reality.

We were looking for the real outback where the men are men and the sheep are nervous.

to wipe his brow and look sourly at his immediate future.

Today's mathematics is intimately bound up with two key areas of human knowledge and activity: the natural world, and the society in which we live.

Exhausted by the stresses, Phillip was called home after four years, and retired to Bath. Apart from founding Sydney, he had one other notable achievement. In 1814, he managed to die by falling from a wheelchair and out of an upstairs window.

We're sending ye tae Wapping, ye soft English nancies, and if ye wairk very, very hard and if ye doonae git on ma tits, then mebbe I'll not cut off yer knackers and put them in ma Christmas pudding. D'ye have any problems with tha'?

some birds and marine mammals are able to switch off one half of their brain at a time, so that one half remains alert while the other is snoozing.

inclined toward Jews or Catholics. The head of the Municipal Reference Library announced that he had independently destroyed all books and pamphlets in his care that struck him as dubious. "I now have an America First library," he said proudly.

Despite its lavish spending, the United States has one of the highest rates of both infant and maternal death among industrialized nations," according to The New York Times.

One of Milton's poems contains the well-known line "Look homeward, Angel, now, and melt with ruth.

the only thing special about the elements that make you is that they make you. That is the miracle of life.

That is unquestionably the most astounding thing about us - that we are just a collection of inert components, the same stuff you would find in a pile of dirt.

successfully. 'Japanese researchers have successfully developed a semiconductor chip made of gallium arsenide' (Associated Press). It was thoughtful of the writer to tell us that the researchers had not unsuccessfully developed a gallium arsenide chip, but also unnecessary. Delete successfully.

That means that a 150-gram 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.

DNA passes on information with extraordinary fidelity. It makes only about one error per every billion letters copied. Still, because your cells divide so much, that is about three errors, or mutations, per cell division. Most of those mutations the body can ignore, but just occasionally they have lasting significance. That is evolution.

That is the great thing about being a foreigner—that you get to spend your life with a whole new set of cultural attachments in addition to the ones you inherited at birth.

What most small investors didn't realize was that things were often stacked against them. Many of the most respected business leaders in the country took part in syndicates in which share prices were shamelessly manipulated for the sake of a large, quick gain at the expense of innocent investors. One such, reported by the financial writer John Brooks in his classic Once in Golconda, involved such