Quotes from Bill Bryson

In America, alas, beauty has become something you drive to, and nature an either/ or proposition—either you ruthlessly subjugate it, as at Tocks Dam and a million other places, or you deify it, treat it as something holy and remote, a thing apart, as along the Appalachian Trail.

The Dunning-Kruger Effect is essentially being too stupid to appreciate how stupid you are.

A study in New Zealand of diabetic patients in 2016 found that the proportion suffering severe complications was 40 percent lower among patients treated by doctors rated high for compassion.

shibboleth. People in Northern Ireland are naturally

The Dunning-Kruger Effect is basically being too stupid to know how stupid you are. That

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

But a Briton, when he wants to sup ale, must find his way to the Dog and Duck, the Goose and Firkin, the Flying Spoon, or the Spotted Dog.

Every bit of penicillin made since that day is descended from that single random cantaloupe

and do you know the difference, by the way, between village and hamlet? It's quite simple, really: One is a place where people live and the other is a play by Shakespeare)

can never understand these people who rush to buy new gadgets; surely they must see that they are going to look like idiots in about a year when the manufacturers come up with tiny lightweight versions of the same thing at half the price. Like the people who paid $200 for the first pocket calculators and then a few months later they were being given away at gas stations. Or the people who bought the first color televisions.

But one must be careful when speaking of 'experimental science' before the Enlightenment, for it often meant demonstrating what one already knew to be the case – and if experiment seemed to contradict axiomatic reason, so much the worse for experiment.

National Arboretum at Westonbirt, just south-west of Cirencester. It is stunning, sensational, absolutely gorgeous: something which should delight every person in the country.

one third of all the money America spent on furniture was spent on radios.

Not long after I moved with my family to a small town in New Hampshire I happened upon a path that vanished into a wood on the edge of town. A sign announced that this was no ordinary footpath but the celebrated Appalachian Trail. Running more than 2,100 miles along America's eastern seaboard, through the serene and beckoning Appalachian Mountains, the AT is the granddaddy of long hikes. From Georgia to Maine

that huge proportions

Their wives, lavishly rouged and powdered, looked as if they had just come from a coffin fitting.

dried cow pies—known euphemistically and rather charmingly as "surface coal.

Andrea di Pietro della Gondola, who in 1524, aged not quite sixteen, arrived in Vicenza

He had experiences as rich and memorable as any young man has ever enjoyed, and was moved by none of them.

There is something in what he said. English is a merry confusion of quirks and irregularities that often seem willfully at odds with logic and common sense.

Although the Spirit of St. Louis looked metallic, and was often described as such in newspaper reports, only the nose cowling was actually of metal. With only a thin layer of canvas between the pilot and the outside world, the Spirit of St. Louis was deafeningly noisy and unnervingly insubstantial. It would have been rather like crossing the ocean in a tent.

Pocas enfermedades se han revelado más resistentes al tratamiento que el alzhéimer.

On the last Sunday of March 1851, the Church of England conducted a national survey to see how many people actually attended church that day. The results were a shock. More than half the people of England and Wales had not gone to church at all, and only 20 percent had gone to an Anglican service.

Guinea worms grow up to a meter long inside the bodies of their victims, then escape by burrowing out of their skin. The only treatment, even now, is to speed the process of exit by winding the worms onto a stick as they emerge.