Quotes by Bill Bryson

Imagine trying to live in a world dominated by dihydrogen oxide, a compound that has no taste or smell and is so variable in its properties that it is generally benign but at other times swiftly lethal. Depending on its state, it can scald you or freeze you. In the presence of certain organic molecules it can form carbonic acids so nasty that they can strip the leaves from trees and eat the faces off statuary. In bulk, when agitated, it can strike with a fury that no human edifice could withstand. Even for those who have learned to live with it, it is an often murderous substance. We call it water.

Worse still, it isn’t actually necessary to look to space for petrifying danger. As we are about to see, Earth can provide plenty of danger of its own.

You are totally at the mercy of nature in this country, mate. Its just a fact of life.

It wasnt until we dropped him at his university dormitory and left him there looking touchingly lost and bewildered amid an assortment of cardboard boxes and suitcases in a spartan room not unlike a prison cell that it really hit home that he was vanishing out of our lives and into his own.

This was 1990 the year that communism died in Europe and it seemed strange to me that in all the words that were written about the fall of the iron curtain, nobody anywhere lamented that it was the end of a noble experiment. I know that communism never worked and I would have disliked living under it myself but none the less it seems that there was a kind of sadness in the thought that the only economic system that appeared to work was one based on self interest and greed.

The question that naturally occurs is “What would it be like if a star exploded nearby?” Our nearest stellar neighbor, as we have seen, is Alpha Centauri, 4.3 light-years away. I had imagined that if there were an explosion there we would have 4.3 years to watch the light of this magnificent event spreading across the sky, as if tipped from a giant can. What would it be like if we had four years and four months to watch an inescapable doom advancing toward us, knowing that when it finally arrived it would blow the skin right off our bones? Would people still go to work? Would farmers plant crops? Would anyone deliver them to the stores?

In terms of adaptability, humans are pretty amazingly useless.

[Americans] were, for one thing, so smitten with the idea of progress that they invented things without having any idea whether those things would be of any use.

Tunney has all the makings of a hero – he was clean living, intelligent, polite, reasonably good-looking – but, like Lou Gehrig, he lacked the chemistry that stirred affection.

It’s a bit burned,” my mother would say apologetically at every meal, presenting you with a piece of meat that looked like something — a much-loved pet perhaps — salvaged from a tragic house fire. “But I think I scraped off most of the burned part,” she would add, overlooking that this included every bit of it that had once been flesh. Happily, all this suited my father. His palate only responded to two tastes - burned and ice cream — so everything suited him so long as it was sufficiently dark and not too startlingly flavorful. Theirs truly was a marriage made in heaven, for no one could burn food like my mother or eat it like my dad.

You may not feel outstandingly robust, but if you are an average-sized adult you will contain within your modest frame no less than 7 X 10^18 joules of potential energy—enough to explode with the force of thirty very large hydrogen bombs, assuming you knew how to liberate it and really wished to make a point.

And now here I was in McDonalds again for the first time since my earlier fracas. I vowed to behave myself, but McDonalds is just too much for me. I ordered a chicken sandwich and a Diet Coke.Do you want fries with that? the young man serving me asked.I hesitated for a moment, and in a pained but patient tone said: No. Thats why I didnt ask for fries, you see.Were just told to ask like, he said.When I want fries, generally I say something like, I would like some fries, too, please. Thats the system I use.Were just told to ask like, he repeated.Do you need to know the other things I dont want? It is quite a long list. In fact, it is everything you serve except for the two things I asked for.Were just told to ask like, he repeated yet again, but in a darker voice, and deposited my two items on a tray and urged me, without the least hint of sincerity, to have a nice day.I realized that I probably wasnt quite ready for McDonalds yet.

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 on a planet that has a more or less infinite capacity to surprise. What reasoning person could possibly want it any other way?

I refer of course to the soaring wonder of the age known as the Eiffel Tower. Never in history has a structure been more technologically advanced, materially obsolescent, and gloriously pointless all at the same time.

It may not look it, but all the glass on Earth is flowing downwards under the relentless drag of gravity. Remove a pane of really old glass from the window of a European cathedral and it will be noticeably thicker at the bottom than at the top.

The current best estimate for the Earth’s weight is 5.9725 billion trillion tonnes, a difference of only about 1 per cent from Cavendish’s finding.

Less than a decade after the Great Exhibition, iron as a structural material was finished—which makes it slightly odd that the most iconic structure of the entire century, about to rise over Paris, was made of that doomed material. I refer of course to the soaring wonder of the age known as the Eiffel Tower. Never in history has a structure been more technologically advanced, materially obsolescent, and gloriously pointless all at the same time.

Noting the lack of crime or security in the Netherlands, the author asked a native who guarded a national landmark. He got the replay, We all do.

Why is it, I wondered, that old people are always so self-centered and excitable? But I just smiled benignly and stood back, comforted by the thought that soon they would be dead.

One idea to a sentence is still the best advice that anyone has ever given on writing.