To get things going he dispatched a man named Edwin Drake – always referred to in history books as “Colonel” Edwin Drake – to Titusville with instructions to drill. Drake had no expertise in drilling and was not a colonel. He was a railroad conductor who had lately been forced to retire through ill health. His sole advantage to the enterprise was that he still possessed a railroad pass and could travel to Pennsylvania for free.

— Bill Bryson

Bill Bryson Quotes

1921, America had about 200,000 cases of diphtheria; by the early 1980s, with vaccination, that had fallen to just 3. In roughly the same period, whooping cough and measles infections fell from about 1.1 million cases a year to just 1,500. Before vaccines, 20,000 Americans a year got polio. By the 1980s, that had dropped to 7 a year.

— Bill Bryson

Cadmium, for instance, is the twenty-third most common element in the body, constituting 0.1 percent of your bulk, but it is seriously toxic.

— Bill Bryson

We have it in us not because our body craves it but because it gets into plants from the soil and then into us when we eat the plants. If you are from North America, you probably ingest about eighty micrograms of cadmium a day, and no part of it does you any good at all.

— Bill Bryson

I don’t know why scientists have been so resistant to the idea of interbreeding. You look at the modern humans that a lot of us have slept with and it is hardly a surprise if a Neanderthal maiden or two might have twinkled by the campfire light.

— Bill Bryson

Slowly it dawned on me what’s going on here. The Natural History Museum can’t afford to be a museum anymore, so the directors are stealthily turning it into a food court.

— Bill Bryson

What fun you can have! And when you get tired of them, tell them to meet you at Brompton Road Station. It closed in 1947, so you’ll never have to see them again.

— Bill Bryson

Norfolk has a long-standing reputation for inbreeding. As my son Sam used to say: “Norfolk: too many people, not enough surnames.” I am not for a moment suggesting that the rumors are entirely true, but I will say that when the police do DNA checks after crimes they sometimes have to arrest as many as twelve thousand people.

— Bill Bryson

When loss of balance is prolonged or severe, the brain doesn’t know quite what to make of it and interprets it as poisoning. That is why loss of balance so generally results in nausea.

— Bill Bryson

When you take a breath, the nitrogen in the air goes into your lungs and straight back out again, like an absentminded shopper who has wandered into the wrong store.

— Bill Bryson

They were “seeing” the first photons – the most ancient light in the universe – though time and distance had converted them to microwaves, just as Gamow had predicted.

— Bill Bryson

What it comes down to really is cancer is, appallingly, your own body doing its best to kill you. It is suicide without permission.

— Bill Bryson

What is it about maps? I could look at them all day, intently studying the names of towns and villages I have never heard of and will never visit, tracing the course of obscure rivers, checking elevations, consulting the marginal notes to see what a little circle with a flag on it signifies and what’s the difference between a pictogram of an airplane with a circle around it and one without, issuing small profound “hmmmms” and nodding my head gravely without having the faintest idea why.

— Bill Bryson

Unlike the curled shoe tongues that are consumed in Britain or the boringly crisp, regimented strips we go for in America, Australian bacon has a rough, meaty, fair dinkum heartiness. It looks as if it was taken off the pig while it was trying to escape. You can almost hear the squeal in every bite. Lovely.

— Bill Bryson

I can remember when you couldn’t buy a British Rail sandwich without wondering if this was your last act before a long period on a life-support machine.

— Bill Bryson

The physicist Richard Feynman once remarked that every time a colleague from the humanities department complained that his students couldn’t spell a common word like seize or accommodate, Feynman wanted to reply, “Then there must be something wrong with the way you spell it.

— Bill Bryson

I have eaten good food in unprepossessing locales, but I doubt the disparity between the crude, shabby atmosphere of that nameless cement-block dispensary of protein and redemption and the quality of the lunch laid on by the butcher of Zegota will ever be matched.

— Bill Bryson

DNA passes on information with extraordinary fidelity. It makes only about one error per every billion letters copied. Still, because your cells divide so much, that is about three errors, or mutations, per cell division. Most of those mutations the body can ignore, but just occasionally they have lasting significance. That is evolution.

— Bill Bryson

It’s a surprise that there was much demand, for in fact most varieties of light meat, including veal, chicken, and all other poultry, were helpfully categorized as fish.

— Bill Bryson

Ask a park official what they are doing about it and he will say, “We are monitoring the situation closely.” For this, read: “We are watching them die.

— Bill Bryson

There were 212 people in Stockholm named Erik Eriksson, 117 named Sven Svensson, 126 named Nils Nilsson, and 259 named Lars Larsson.

— Bill Bryson
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