Quotes from Bill Bryson

Exercise regularly. Eat sensibly. Die anyway.

Atwater's most unsettling discovery—to himself as much as to the world at large—was that alcohol was an especially rich source of calories, and thus an efficient fuel. As the son of a clergyman and a teetotaler himself, he was appalled to report it, but as a diligent scientist he felt his first duty was to the truth, however awkward. In consequence, he was swiftly disowned by his own, devoutly Methodist university and its already scornful president.

Instead, we look for patterns in the facts, and some of these patterns we have come to call the laws of Nature, while others have achieved only the status of by-laws.

To call human beings 'stewards' of this planet is like accepting that Jack the Ripper is the right man to start a Home for the Care and Protection of Fallen Women.

It's just that. It's just that sometimes all I see ahead of me is TV dinners - a sort of endless line of them dancing towards me like in a cartoon - Katz

The number of chemicals in use in the developed world was more than 82,000 at the last count, and most of them – 86 per cent, according to one estimate – have never been tested for their effects on humans.

Lots of people leave Pennsylvania limping and bruised. The state also has what are reputed to be the meanest rattlesnakes anywhere along the trail

What makes Halsted's achievements all the more remarkable is that for much of his career he was a drug addict. While investigating methods for providing pain

She had, I realized, Retail Tourette's Syndrome, a compulsion to blurt advice. There was nothing she could do about it.

A heart attack, as one doctor has put it, is "50 percent genetic and 50 percent cheeseburger.

If everybody else in the world became the size of Americans, it would be equivalent to adding one billion people to the world's population.

It struck me, not for the first time, that there seemed to be more places in Australia for tourists to go than there were tourists to fill them. At

At the North Carolina border, the dull landscape ended abruptly, as if by decree. Suddenly the countryside rose and fell in majestic undulations, full of creeping thickets of laurel, rhododendron and palmetto.

A breakfast recorded by the Duke of Wellington consisted of 'two pigeons and three beefsteaks, three parts of a bottle of Mozelle, a glass of champagne, two glasses of port and a glass of brandy' – and this was when he was feeling a little under the weather.

Not only were the Anglo-Saxons relatively uncultured, they were also pagan, a fact rather quaintly preserved in the names of four of our weekdays, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday, which respectively commemorate the gods Tiw, Woden, and Thor, and Woden's wife, Frig. (Saturday, Sunday, and Monday, to complete the picture, take their names from Saturn, the sun, and the moon.)

we know more about how ancient Greeks and Romans sat or reclined than we do about the English of eight hundred years ago.

Feral Future: The Untold Story of Australia's Exotic Invaders

Phineas Gage was packing dynamite into a rock and it exploded prematurely

It is often written that a kind of medieval footstool was called a tuffet—a presumption based entirely on the venerable line "Little Miss Muffet sat on a tuffet." In fact, the only place the word appears in historic English is in the nursery rhyme itself. If tuffets ever actually existed, they are not otherwise recorded.

If you have a morbid fear of peanut butter sticking to the roof of your mouth, there is a word for it: arachibutyrophobia… And there's a word for describing a sudden breaking off of thought: aposiopesis… When you are just dropping off to sleep and you experience that sudden sensation of falling, there is a word for it: it's a myoclonic jerk.

There isn't a landscape in the world that is more artfully worked, more lovely to behold, more comfortable to be in, than the countryside of Great Britain. It is the world's largest park, its most perfect accidental garden.

On the other hand, it you are outdoors in cold weather and your head is the only part of you that is exposed, then it will play a disproportionate part in any heat loss, so listen to your mother when she tells you to put a hat on.

Boxing Day. Country pubs. Saying 'you're the dog's bollocks' as an expression of endearment or admiration. Jam roly-poly with custard Ordnance Survey maps I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue Cream teas The shipping forecast The 20p piece June evenings, about 8pm Smelling the sea before you see it Villages with ridiculous names like Shellow Bowells and Nether Wallop

Built in the hope of distracting workers from the peril of drink, it contained a gymnasium, a laboratory, a billiards room, a library, a reading room, and a lecture and concert hall. Never before had manual workers been given a more lavish opportunity to better themselves, an opportunity that many scores enthusiastically seized. One James Waddington, an untutored woolsorter, became a world authority on linguistics and a leading light of the Phonetic Society of Great Britain and Ireland.