Quotes from Bill Bryson

Silbury Hill in Wiltshire

I suppose because I grew up a thousand miles from the sea and missed the great age of passenger liners, I have always been subject to a romantic longing for ocean travel.

don't become paralyzed, and they do indeed sometimes

If it was his goal in life to make as little impression as possible upon history, he achieved it gloriously.

The author says the earliest Australian aborigines devoted extraordinary amounts of energy to enterprises no one now can understand.

You can't have a more civilized community than one in which hospital staff play cricket at the end of a summer's day and lunatics can wander and mingle without exciting comment or alarm. It was wonderful, possibly unsurpassable. It really was. That was the Britain I came to. I wish it could be that place again.

That," he said, "is where all your skin color is. That's all that race is—a sliver of epidermis.

So what do you say to some cream soda? Katz said brightly. I'll buy. I looked at him with deepened interest. You don't have any money. I know. I'll buy it with your money.

Just passing through a door, being inside, surrounded by walls and a ceiling, was novel.

The queen also toyed with the idea of making the whole of St. James's Park private, and asked her prime minister, Robert Walpole, how much that would cost. "Only a crown, Madam," he replied with a thin smile.

there. I had thought we would have

It hardly needs pointing out that for most of history the focus of medicine has been to make sick people better, but now increasingly doctors devote their energies to trying to head off problems before they even arise, through programmes of screening and the like, and that changes the dynamics of care entirely.

his facetious grace in writing," and much else.

Language is more fashion than science

Even so, as was his custom, he writes the name in an abbreviated form: "Wllm Shaksp." It also has a large blot on the end of the surname, probably because of the comparatively low quality of the paper. Though it is only a deposition, it is also the only document in existence containing a transcript of Shakespeare speaking in his own voice.

It took Read some twenty years of searching to nail the matter down, but thanks to his efforts we now know that OK first appeared in print in the Boston Morning Post on 23 March 1839, as a jocular abbreviation for 'Oll Korrect'. At

If one's husband had been married before and widowed—a fairly common condition—and a close relative of his first wife's died, the second wife was expected to engage in "complementary mourning"—a kind of proxy mourning on behalf of the deceased earlier partner.

Is it raining out?" the reception girl asked brightly as I filled in the registration card between sneezes and pauses to wipe water from my face with the back of my arm. "No, my ship sank and I had to swim the last seven miles." "Oh, yes?" she went on

We forget just how painfully dim the world was before electricity. A candle—a good candle—provides barely a hundredth of the illumination of a single 100-watt lightbulb.* Open your refrigerator door and you summon forth more light than the total amount enjoyed by most households in the eighteenth century.

He was particularly prolific, as David Crystal points out, when it came to attaching un- prefixes to existing words to make new words that no one had thought of before – unmask, unhand, unlock, untie, unveil and no fewer than 309 others in a similar vein. Consider how helplessly prolix the alternatives to any of these terms are and you appreciate how much punch Shakespeare gave English.

It would be possible to sail from Scandinavia to Canada without once crossing more than 250 miles of open sea.

A person's lifetime risk of colorectal cancer is about 5 percent, and eating processed meat every day appears to boost a person's absolute risk of cancer by 1 percentage point, to 6 percent (that's 18 percent of the 5 percent lifetime risk).

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, barely 350 yards a day.

Curiously, among the few survivors from this culinary onslaught is one that is most difficult to understand: the fish knife. Though it remains the standard instrument for dealing with fish of all kinds, no one has ever identified a single advantage conferred by its odd scalloped shape or worked out the original thinking behind it. There isn't a single kind of fish that it cuts better or bones more delicately than a conventional knife does.