Quotes from Bill Bryson

Thirst, curiously, is not a reliable indication of how much water you need. People allowed to drink all the water they want after getting very thirsty usually report feeling slaked after drinking only one-fifth the amount they have lost through perspiration.

Isn't it amazing how many people in the world hate you? Most of them you will never even meet, and yet they really don't like you at all. All the people who write software at Microsoft hate you, and so do most of the people who answer phones at Expedia.

Lobsters bred in such abundance around Britain's coastline that they were fed to prisoners and orphans or ground up for fertilizer; servants sought written agreements from their employers that they would not be served lobster more than twice a week.

Over a lifetime, we eat about sixty tons of food, which is equivalent, notes Carl Zimmer in Microcosm, to eating sixty small cars. In 1915, the average American spent half his weekly income on food. Today it's just 6 percent

In consequence, some 50 percent of people globally are estimated to be vitamin D deficient for at least part of the year. In northern climes, it may be as much as 90 percent.

headed instead across the field to the Magna Carta memorial, a little open-air rotunda erected in 1957 by the American Bar Association and memorable today as the only decent thing ever done by lawyers.

To reduce dangers at night, people covered fires with a kind of domed lid called a coverfeu (from which comes the word curfew)

A striking marker of just how confused nutrition advice can be was a finding by an advisory committee for the American Heart Association that 37 percent of American nutritionists rate coconut oil—which is essentially nothing but saturated fat in liquid form—as a "healthy food." Coconut oil may be tasty, but it is no better for you than a big scoop of deep-fried butter.

The Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., contains about seven thousand works on Shakespeare—twenty years' worth of reading if read at the rate of one a day—and, as this volume slimly attests, the number keeps growing.

Every tree wore a thick cloak of white, every stump and boulder a jaunty snowy cap, and there was that perfect, immense stillness that you get nowhere else but in a big woods after a heavy snowfall.

we are all now descended from a single mitochondrial ancestor – a woman who lived in Africa about 200,000 years ago. You may have heard her referred to as Mitochondrial Eve. She is, in a sense, mother of us all.

there are about seven thousand rare diseases—so many that about one person in seventeen in the developed world has one, which isn't very rare at all. But, sadly, so long as a disease affects only a small number of people, it is unlikely to get much research attention. For 90 percent of rare diseases, there are no treatments at all.

Lots of people leave Pennsylvania limping and bruised. The state also has what are reputed to be the meanest rattlesnakes anywhere along the trail, and the most unreliable water sources, particularly in high summer.

if you formed all the DNA in your body into a single strand, it would stretch ten billion miles, to beyond Pluto.

The greatest possible irony would be if in our endless quest to fill our lives with comfort and happiness we created a world that had neither. But that of course would be another book.

I also learned that about ten thousand containers fall off ships each year. Sometimes after a period of years the container doors pop open and the contents float to the surface.

Ruskin never escaped his prudish ways or gave any indication of desiring to. After the death of J. M. W. Turner, in 1851, Ruskin was given the job of going through the works left to the nation by the great artist and found several watercolors of a cheerfully erotic nature. Horrified, Ruskin decided that they could only have been drawn "under a certain condition of insanity," and for the good of the nation destroyed almost all of them, robbing posterity of several priceless works.

who had drowned in Greece nearly thirty years before.

I would sooner have bowel surgery in the woods with a stick.

One of the undoubted virtues of English is that it is a fluid and democratic language in which meanings shift and change in response to the pressures of common usage rather than the dictates of committees. It is a natural process that has been going on for centuries. To interfere with that process is arguably both arrogant and futile, since clearly the weight of usage will push new meanings into currency no matter how many authorities hurl themselves into the path of change.

at Birkenhead, near Liverpool, designed and built the world's first municipal park. This park so captivated the American landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted that he modeled Central Park in New York on it.

VAT Value Added Tax, a sales tax (currently 17.5 percent in Britain) imposed on nearly everything.

appendicitis

To make matters worse, somebody in our group was making the most dreadful silent farts. Fortunately, it was me, so I wasn't nearly as bothered as the others.