Bill Bryson Quotes

Orange roughy, a sluggish but delicious ocean fish, were caught in vast numbers before marine biologists realized how desperately susceptible to extinction they were.

Our instinct may be to see the impossibility of tracking everything down as frustrating, dispiriting, perhaps even appalling, but it can just as well be viewed as almost unbearably exciting. We live o...

Out of all the incursions, the only permanent one so far is the present one, and that dates from just twelve thousand years ago, which means that Britain is actually one of the more recent places in t...

Perforated eardrums were quite common16, too; but, as Haldane reassuringly noted in one of his essays, ‘the drum generally heals up; and if a hole remains in it, although one is somewhat deaf, one can...

Physics is really nothing more than a search for ultimate simplicity, but so far all we have is a kind of elegant messiness.

Pilchard begins his long run in from short stump. He bowls and … oh, he’s out! Yes, he’s got him. Longwilley is caught leg-before in middle slops by Grattan. Well, now what do you make of that, Nevill...

Più che per qualsiasi altro scrittore, in Shakespeare le parole sono separate dalla vita. Era un uomo così bravo a nascondere ciò che provava che non possiamo nemmeno essere sicuri che provasse qualco...

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, sometimes very much more so—for pal...

Seven

Shakespeare, it appears, was caught up in the affair because he had been a lodger in Mountjoy’s house in Cripplegate in 1604 when the dispute arose.

Shenandoah National Park is lovely. It is possibly the most wonderful national park I have ever been in, and, considering the impossible and conflicting demands put on it, it is extremely well run. Al...

Skull of an early modern human, dating from 90,000 years ago, found at Qafzeh in Israel. Found at the same site were remains of Neandertals, suggesting that here at least the two species coexisted, po...

So I decided to do it [hike the Appalachian Trail]. More rashly, I announced my intention - told friends and neighbors, confidently informed my publisher, made it common knowledge among those who knew...

So it needs to be said that nearly all of the anti-Shakespeare sentiment—actually all of it, every bit—involves manipulative scholarship or sweeping misstatements of fact. Shakespeare never owned a bo...

So we are stuck with a theory, and we do not know whether it is right or wrong, but we do know that it is a little wrong, or at least incomplete. In

So why, you are bound to ask at some point in your life, do microbes so often want to hurt us? What possible satisfaction could there be to a microbe in having us grow feverish or chilled, or disfigur...

Someone needs to explain to me how it is that the richer Britain gets, the poorer it thinks itself. All

Somewhere in all this, it was thought, there also resided a mysterious élan vital, the force that brought inanimate objects to life. No-one knew where this ethereal essence lay, but two things seemed...

Space, let me repeat, is enormous. The average distance between stars out there is 20 million million miles. Even at speeds approaching those of light, these are fantastically challenging distances fo...

Speakers from the Mediterranean region, for instance, like to put their faces very close, relatively speaking, to those they are addressing. A common scene when people from southern Europe and norther...