Bill Bryson Quotes

She was the mother of eight children: four daughters, of whom only one lived to adulthood, and four sons, all of whom reached their majority but only one of whom, Will, married.

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 art...

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....

So here I am, my affections torn between a postal service that never feeds me but can tackle a challenge and one that gives me free tape and prompt service but won't help me out when I can't remember...

So it’s not the sight of stromatolites that makes them exciting. It’s the idea of them – and in this respect they are peerless. Well, imagine it. You are looking at living rocks – quietly functioning...

So what is your star sign?' Said Mary Ellen 'Cunnilingus' Katz answered looking profoundly unhappy.

So you must be the guys she was talking about. Really? Katz said. What’d she say? Oh, nothing, he said, but he was suppressing a small smile in that way that makes you say: What? Nothing. It was nothi...

Some of the changes since Shakespeare’s time are obvious. Thee and thou had already begun a long decline (though they still exist in some dialects of northern England). Originally thou was to you as i...

Soon levees up and down the river were popping like buttons off a tight shirt. At Mounds Landing, Mississippi, a hundred black workers, kept at their posts by men with rifles, were swept to oblivion w...

Still, I never really mind bad service in a restaurant. It makes me feel better about not leaving a tip.

Suddenly, in the space of a moment, I realized what it was that I loved about Britain - which is to say, all of it. Every last bit of it, good and bad - Marmite, village fetes, country lanes, people s...

Suponiendo que las cosas sigan siendo en general como ahora, el océano Atlántico se expandirá hasta llegar a ser mucho mayor que el Pacífico. Gran parte de California se alejará flotando y se converti...

Survival on Earth is a surprisingly tricky business. Of the billions and billions of species of living thing that have existed since the dawn of time, most—99.99 percent—are no longer around. Life on...

That is the great thing about being a foreigner—that you get to spend your life with a whole new set of cultural attachments in addition to the ones you inherited at birth.

The British molecular biologist Rosalind Franklin, who played a central part in discovering the structure of DNA but suffered from the heavy chauvinism of her male colleagues.

The Eiffel Tower wasn’t just the largest thing that anyone had ever proposed to build, it was the largest completely useless thing. It wasn’t a palace or burial chamber or place of worship. It didn’t...

The Greater London Development Plan would have cost a then-colossal £2 billion, making it the biggest public investment ever made in Britain. That was its salvation. Britain couldn’t afford it. In the...

The Italians even have a word for the mark left on a table by a moist glass (culacino) while the Gaelic speakers of Scotland, not to be outdone, have a word for the itchiness that overcomes the upper...

The Reverend Sydney Smith, though a man of the cloth, caught the spirit of the age by declining to say grace. 'With the ravenous orgasm upon you, it seems impertinent to interpose a religious sentimen...

The amount of energy actually liberated in the burning of these fossil fuels is tiny by planetary scales – ten terawatts or so a year, not that much more than the nuga-tory contribution made by the ti...