Quotes from Bill Bryson

The New York Times, with what was threatening to become a customary lack of prescience, forecast that it would never be a serious competitor for radio because "people must sit and keep their eyes glued on a screen; the average American family hasn't time for it."34

In 1580, when William was sixteen, Campion passed through Warwickshire on his way to the more safely Catholic north. He stayed with a distant relative of Shakespeare's, Sir William Catesby, whose son Robert would later be a ringleader of the Gunpowder Plot.

canvas tarpaulin, and a piece of old carpet. I'm not sure that they didn't lay an old wardrobe on top of that, just to

That's really what history mostly is, masses of people doing ordinary things.

So Whitney's gin not only helped make many people rich on both sides of the Atlantic but also reinvigorated slavery, turned child labor into a necessity, and paved the way for the American Civil War. Perhaps at no other time in history has someone with a simple, well-meaning invention generated more general prosperity, personal disappointment, and inadvertent suffering than Eli Whitney with his gin. That is quite a lot of consequence for a simple rotating drum.

Visitors to eighteenth-century London often noted that the shops were open till ten at night, and clearly there would be no shops without shoppers.

Despite the ambiguities I have just confessed to, most of me wants very badly not to die just yet, and I am sure the majority of writers and scientists working in this area agree.

All that is gone. Nowadays we have nothing but meaningless names. Look at Starbucks and their cup sizes—Venti, Trenta, and Wanko Grande or whatever.

Settling down also brought a huge increase in "human commensals"—mice, rats, and other creatures that live with and off us—and these all too often acted as disease vectors.

It was interesting, I thought, that the memorial to Tip was grander than the memorial to the men who took part in the dam-busters raids, but then I remembered that this was England and Tip was a dog.

Simeon Potter notes that when James II first saw St. Paul's Cathedral he called it amusing, awful, and artificial, and meant that it was pleasing to look at, deserving of awe, and full of skillful artifice.

when authorities learned that Eugene O'Neill's play All God's Chillun proposed to show black and white children playing together as if that were normal, the district attorney for Manhattan sent the police to stop it.

the beaver and bear nearly

the Pilgrims didn't have to learn Algonquian for the happy and convenient reason that Samoset and Squanto spoke English—Samoset only a little, but Squanto with total assurance (and some Spanish into the bargain).

The very brightest gas streetlamps provided less light than a modern 25-watt bulb.

Where everyone stinks, no one stinks.

Altogether, according to RSC calculations, fifty-nine elements are needed to construct a human being. Six of these—carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, calcium, and phosphorus—account for 99.1 percent of what makes us, but much of the rest is a bit unexpected.

Remarkably, Darwin hadn't finished with barnacles yet. Three years later he produced a 684-page study of sessile cirripedes and a more modest companion work on the barnacle fossils not mentioned in the first work. "I hate a barnacle as no man ever did before," he declared upon the conclusion of the work, and it is hard not to sympathize.

By modern standards the whole of greater London, including Southwark and Westminster, was small. It stretched only about two miles from north to south and three from east to west, and could be crossed on foot in not much more than an hour.

But Pauline would not take advice, She lit a match, it was so nice! It crackled so, it burned so clear,— Exactly like the picture here She jumped for joy and ran about, And was too pleased to put it out. Now see! Oh see! What a dreadful thing The fire has caught her apron-string; Her apron burns, her arms, her hair; She burns all over, everywhere.

All the gases of flatus can make a pretty explosive combination, as was tragically demonstrated in Nancy, France, in 1978 when surgeons stuck an electrically heated wire up the rectum of a sixty-nine-year-old man to cauterize a polyp and caused an explosion that literally tore the patient apart.

Forty-two percent of all that was produced in the world was produced in the United States. America made 80 percent of the world's movies and 85 percent of its cars.

When I was growing up I used to think that the best thing about coming from Des Moines was that it meant you didn't come from anywhere else in Iowa. By Iowa standards, Des Moines is a mecca of cosmopolitanism

Kanizsa triangle