Quotes from Bill Bryson

The liver was long thought to be the seat of courage, which is why a cowardly person was deemed "lily-livered.

According to one survey, half of people under the age of thirty said they would sacrifice their sense of smell rather than part with a favored electronic device.

Between December 1606 and February 1625, Virginia received 7,289 immigrants and buried 6,040 of them. Most barely had time to settle in. All but 500 of the 3,500 immigrants who arrived in the three years 1619–1621 were dead by the end of the period. To go to Virginia was effectively to commit suicide.

Happiness is a good bank account, a good cook and a good digestion. —jean-jacques rousseau

Or look at the old money, with its florins and half crowns and thrupenny bits, and imagine what it was like in the days when people had to add tuppence ha'penny to one shilling four nibblings or whatever. With

Edison was not a wholly attractive human being. He didn't scruple to cheat or lie, and was prepared to steal patents or bribe journalists for favorable coverage. In the words of one of his contemporaries, he had "a vacuum where his conscience ought to be." But he was enterprising and hardworking and a peerless organizer.

the basement. Katz

I was beginning to appreciate that the central feature of life on the Appalachian Trail is deprivation, that the whole point of the experience is to remove yourself so thoroughly from the conveniences of everyday life that the most ordinary things -- processed cheese, a can of pop gorgeously beaded with condensation -- fill you with wonder and gratitude.

In one well-known case, a woman named Martha Robinson was for years beaten and physically misused by a cruel and unstable husband. Eventually, he infected her with gonorrhea and then poisoned her almost to the point of death by slipping antivenereal powders into her food without her knowledge. Her health and spirit broken, she sued for divorce. The judge listened carefully to the arguments, then dismissed the case and sent Mrs. Robinson home with instructions to try to be more patient.

The country accepted it not only willingly, but almost absent-mindedly.

The greatest part of the tragedy is that there was actually plenty of food in Ireland itself. The country produced great quantities of eggs, cereals and meats of every type, and brought in large hauls of food from the sea, but almost all went for export. So 1.5 million people needlessly starved. It was the greatest loss of life anywhere in Europe since the Black Death.

Rich women, including the queen, made themselves additionally beauteous by bleaching their skin with compounds of borax, sulfur, and lead—all at least mildly toxic

As late as the 1930s, almost half of London streets were still lit by gas.

Il cervello è l'individuo. Il resto è un insieme di tubi e impalcature.

And then you might learn, as we did from a local, that the reason hundreds of starlings in flight will twist and turn in unison is because the ones on the outside are constantly trying to get to the inside where they feel safer. Some

The stomach holds about one and a half quarts, which is not very much compared with other animals. The stomach of a big dog will hold up to twice as much food as yours does.

It is beyond us to divine how any people could have bred cobs of corn from such a thin and unpropitious plant—or even thought to try. Hoping to settle the matter once and for all, food scientists from around the world convened in 1969 at a conference on the origin of corn at the University of Illinois, but the debates grew so vituperative and bitter, and at times so personal, that the conference broke up in confusion and no papers from it were ever published.

Donkin's invention preserved foods beautifully, though the early cans, made of wrought iron, were heavy and practically impossible to get into. One brand bore instructions to open them with a hammer and chisel. Soldiers usually attacked them with bayonets or fired bullets into them.

Just to ease you into a sense of perspective here, Australia is the least wooded continent (Antarctica excluded, of course) and yet it is also the world's largest exporter of woodchips

With the canal, the cost of shipping a ton of flour from Buffalo to New York City fell from $120 a ton to $6 a ton, and the carrying time was reduced from three weeks to just over one. The effect on New York's fortunes was breathtaking. Its share of national exports leaped from less than 10 percent in 1800 to over 60 percent by the middle of the century; in the same period, even more dazzlingly, its population went from ten thousand to well over half a million.

The result is a language that is wonderfully fluid and accommodating, but also complex, undirected and often puzzling—in a word, troublesome.

Did you know—this is a little-known fact but absolute truth—that when they dedicate a new multistory car park, the Lord Mayor and his wife have a ceremonial pee in the stairwell? It's true.

Rat bites are almost certainly under reported because only the most serious cases attract attention, but even using the most conservative figures, at least fourteen thousand people in the United States are attacked by rats each year.

Farther west, Michigan's seemingly inexhaustible stock of white pine—170 billion board feet of it when the first colonists arrived—shrank by 95 percent in just a century.