Quotes from Bill Bryson

Taxonomy is described sometimes as a science and sometimes as an art, but really it's a battleground.

I refer of course to the soaring wonder of the age known as the Eiffel Tower. Never in history has a structure been more technologically advanced, materially obsolescent, and gloriously pointless all at the same time.

Every twenty minutes on the Appalachian Trail, Katz and I walked farther than the average American walks in a week. For 93 percent of all trips outside the home, for whatever distance or whatever purpose, Americans now get in a car. On average, the total walking of an American these days - that's walking of all types: from car to office, from office to car, around the supermarket and shopping malls - adds up to 1.4 miles a week...That's ridiculous.

Brain cells last as long as you do. You are issued with a hundred billion or so at birth and that is all you are ever going to get. It has been estimated that you lose five hundred of them an hour, so if you have any serious thinking to do there really isn't a moment to waste.

I've said it before in another book, but I believe it's worth repeating: the only thing special about the elements that make you is that they make you. That is the miracle of life.

The tearoom lady called me love. All the shop ladies called me love and most of the men called me mate. I hadn't been here twelve hours and already they loved me.

The taipan is the one to watch out for. It is the most poisonous snake on Earth, with a lunge so swift and a venom so potent that your last mortal utterance is likely to be: I say, is that a sn--

All that is really going in your mouth is texture and chemicals. It is your brain that reads these scentless, flavorless molecules and vivifies them for your pleasure. Your brownie is sheet music. It is your brain that makes it a symphony.

Consider the Lichen. Lichens are just about the hardiest visible organisms on Earth, but the least ambitious.

It was one of those sumptuous days when the world is full of autumn muskiness and tangy, crisp perfection: vivid blue sky, deep green fields, leaves in a thousand luminous hues. It is a truly astounding sight when every tree in a landscape becomes individual, when each winding back highway and plump hillside is suddenly and infinitely splashed with every sharp shade that nature can bestow - flaming scarlet, lustrous gold, throbbing vermilion, fiery orange.

Language, never forget, is more fashion than science, and matters of usage, spelling and pronunciation tend to wander around like hemlines.

No one knows, incidentally, why Australia's spiders are so extravagantly toxic; capturing small insects and injecting them with enough poison to drop a horse would appear to be the most literal case of overkill. Still, it does mean that everyone gives them lots of space.

What is it about maps? I could look at them all day, earnestly studying the names of towns and villages I have never heard of and will never visit...

The number of people on whose cooperative efforts your eventual existence depends has risen to approximately 1,000,000,000,000,000,000, which is several thousand times the total number of people who have ever lived.

Perhaps it's my natural pessimism, but it seems that an awfully large part of travel these days is to see things while you still can.

The universe is not only queerer than we suppose; it is queerer than we can suppose

Most of what has lived on Earth has left behind no record at all.

But don't worry, she continued. Most snakes don't want to hurt you. If you're out in the bush and a snake comes along, just stop dead and let it slide over your shoes. This, I decided, was the least-likely-to-be-followed advice I have ever been given.

Even though sugar was very expensive, people consumed it till their teeth turned black, and if their teeth didn't turn black naturally, they blackened them artificially to show how wealthy and marvelously self-indulgent they were.

Coming back to your native land after an absence of many years is a surprisingly unsettling business, a little like waking up from a long coma.

A third...candidate for Shakespearean authorship was Christopher Marlowe. He was the right age (just two months older than Shakespeare), had the requisite talent, and would certainly have had ample leisure after 1593, assuming he wasn't too dead to work.

I sat on a toilet watching the water run thinking what an odd thing tourism is. You fly off to a strange land, eagerly abandoning all the comforts of home and then expend vast quantities of time and money in a largely futile effort to recapture the comforts you wouldn't have lost if you hadn't left home in the first place.

Make no mistake. This is a planet of microbes. We are here at their pleasure. They don't need us at all. We'd be dead in a day without them.

It's an unnerving thought that we may be the living universe's supreme achievement and its worst nightmare simultaneously.