Generally speaking – which is of course always a dangerous thing to do, generally speaking – Americans revere the past only as long as there is some money in it somewhere and it doesn’t mean going without air-conditioning, free parking and other essential conveniences.

— Bill Bryson

Bill Bryson Quotes

Too often for such people the notion of good English has less to do with expressing ideas clearly than with making words conform to some arbitrary pattern.

— Bill Bryson

Just passing through a door, being inside, surrounded by walls and a ceiling, was novel.

— Bill Bryson

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.

— Bill Bryson

Exercise regularly. Eat sensibly. Die anyway.

— Bill Bryson

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.

— Bill Bryson

I was weary of the trail, but still strangely in its thrall; found the endless slog tedious but irresistible; grew tired of the boundless woods but admired their boundlessness; enjoyed the escape from civilization and ached for its comforts. I wanted to quit and to do this forever, sleep in a bed and in a tent, see what was over the next hill and never see a hill again. All of this all at once, every moment, on the trail or off. “I don’t know,” I said. “Yes and no, I guess. What about you?” He.

— Bill Bryson

Atul Gawande has written, “is getting clinicians like me to do the one thing that consistently halts the spread of infections: wash our hands.

— Bill Bryson

As late as 1921, twenty-seven people perished in a stove fire on a train near Philadelphia.

— Bill Bryson

Jules Feiffer once drew a strip cartoon in which the down-at-heel character observed that first he was called poor, then needy, then deprived, then underprivileged, and then disadvantaged, and concluded that although he still didn’t have a dime he sure had acquired a fine vocabulary.

— Bill Bryson

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

Even with the advantage of clothing, shelter, and boundless ingenuity, humans can manage to live on only about 12 percent of Earth’s land area and just 4 percent of the total surface area if you include the seas. It is a sobering thought that 96 percent of our planet is off-limits to us.

— Bill Bryson

Today the National Park Service employs a more casual approach to endangering wildlife: neglect. It spends almost nothing – less than 3 percent of its budget – on research of any type, which is why no one knows how many mussels are extinct or even why they are going extinct.

— 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
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