Quotes from Bill Bryson

What a joy walking is. All the cares of life, all the hopeless, inept fuckwits that God has strewn along the Bill Bryson Highway of Life, suddenly seem far away and harmless, and the world becomes tranquil and welcoming and good.

Science is about making stuff, just as much as it is about understanding stuff.

IQ test was invented not to determine how smart people are but how stupid)

on your head) are tiny mites called Demodex folliculorum.

Eighty percent of cancers, known as carcinomas, arise in epithelial cells—that is, the cells that make up the skin and the linings of organs. Breast cancers, for instance, don't just grow randomly within the breast, but normally begin in the milk ducts.

As many as one-third of all stair accidents occur on the first or last step, and two-thirds occur on the first or last three steps.

If the global temperature rises by 4°C over the next fifty years, as is evidently possible, the whole of the Appalachian wilderness below New England could become savanna. Already trees are dying in frightening numbers. The elms and chestnuts are long gone, the stately hemlocks and flowery dogwoods are going, and the red spruces, Fraser firs, mountain ashes, and sugar maples may be about to follow. Clearly, if ever there was a time to experience this singular wilderness, it was now.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt's grandfather Warren Delano made much of the family's fortune by trading opium, a fact that the Roosevelt family has never exactly crowed about.

Eighty percent of cancers, known as carcinomas, arise in epithelial cells—that is, the cells that make up the skin and the linings of organs. Breast cancers, for instance, don't just grow randomly within the breast, but normally begin in the milk ducts. Epithelial cells are assumed to be particularly susceptible to cancers because they divide rapidly and often.

And as you are about to see, it not only produces the best science, but also some of the very best science writing.

My father once owned a McGregor Glen Plaid Visa-Versa Reversible Jacket and got real pleasure from showing people, including total strangers, how you could turn it inside out and have a second, bonus jacket. "That's why it's called Visa-Versa," he would explain, as if revealing one of the secrets of the universe.

English also has a commendable tendency toward conciseness, in contrast to many languages

The British really are the only people in the world who become genuinely enlivened when presented with a hot beverage and a small plain biscuit.

In 1846, America had more than 650 whaling ships, roughly three times as many as all the rest of the world put together.

arachibutyrophobia.

the Maoris of New Zealand have thirty-five words for dung (don't ask me why).

In the time of Dickens, almost all ironwork was green, light blue, or dull gray.

To get things going he dispatched a man named Edwin Drake—always referred to in history books as "Colonel" Edwin Drake—to Titusville with instructions to drill. Drake had no expertise in drilling and was not a colonel. He was a railroad conductor who had lately been forced to retire through ill health. His sole advantage to the enterprise was that he still possessed a railroad pass and could travel to Pennsylvania for free.

They explained to me that this is simply an affliction of age. The older you get the more it seems the world belongs to other people.

All that is missing to connect her with Shakespeare is anything to connect her with Shakespeare.

He invested heavily in an automated general store in which customers would put a coin in a slot and a moment later a bag of coal, potatoes, onions, nails, hairpins, or other desired commodity would come sliding down a chute to them. The system never worked. It never came close to working.

Even his command of languages was only partial: although he could read them flawlessly, he used his own made-up pronunciations, which no one who spoke the languages could actually understand. In Norway, hoping to impress colleagues, he once tried to order a dish of raspberries and was brought twelve beers.

When the company was finally broken up in the 1980s to satisfy antitrust regulators, it was worth more than the combined worth of General Electric, General Motors, Ford, IBM, Xerox, and Coca-Cola, and employed a million people.) Bell moved to Washington, D.C., became

Britain's Royal Society of Chemistry when, as part of the 2013 Cambridge Science Festival, it calculated how much it would cost to assemble all the elements necessary to build the actor Benedict Cumberbatch. (Cumberbatch was the guest director of the festival that year and was, conveniently, a typically sized human.)