The collection / 137 fragments

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Passages, proverbs, and questions carried across the ages.

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137 results · Page 6 of 6Play this collection ▷

01Undated

People don't talk like this, theytalklikethis. Syllables, words, sentences run together like a watercolor left in the rain. To understand what anyone is saying to us we must separate these noises into words and the words into sentences so that we might in our turn issue a stream of mixed sounds in response. If what we say is suitably apt and amusing, the listener will show his delight by emitting a series of uncontrolled high-pitched noises, accompanied by sharp intakes of breath of the sort normally associated with a seizure or heart failure. And by these means we converse. Talking, when you think about it, is a very strange business indeed.

Bill Bryson / quote

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02Undated

And there was this jerk named Dwayne who kept saying, 'Go on, have a beer. You know you want one. One little beer's not going to hurt ya. You haven't had a drink for three years. You can handle it.'" He looked at me again. "You know?"I nodded."Caught me when I was vulnerable. You know, when I was still breathing.

Bill Bryson / quote

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03Undated

As the physicist Paul Davies puts it, 'If everything needs everything else, how did the communities of molecules ever arise in the first place?' It is rather as if all the ingredients in your kitchen somehow got together and baked themselves into a cake - but a cake that could moreover divide when necessary to produce more cakes. It is little wonder that we call it the miracle of life. It is also little wonder that we have barely begun to understand it.

Bill Bryson / quote

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04Undated

In the mystifying world that was Victorian parenthood, obedience took precedence over all considerations of affection and happiness, and that odd, painful conviction remained the case in most well-heeled homes up until at least the time of the First World War.

Bill Bryson / quote

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05Undated

Presumably, a confused person would be too addled to recognize that he was confused. Ergo, if you know that you are not confused then you are not confused. Unless, it suddenly occurred to me--and here was an arresting notion--unless persuading yourself that you are not confused is merely a cruel, early symptom of confusion. Or even an advanced symptom. Who could tell? For all I knew I could be stumbling into some kind of helpless preconfusional state characterized by fear on the part of the sufferer that he may be stumbling into some kind of helpless preconfusional state. That's the trouble with losing your mind; by the time it's gone, it's too late to get it back.

Bill Bryson / quote

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06Undated

She would only make me take my seat if I didn't act calm and Swiss about it all.

Bill Bryson / quote

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07Undated

I love to watch cities wake up, and Paris wakes up more abruptly, more startlingly, than any place I know.

Bill Bryson / quote

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08Undated

An awful lot of England is slowly eroding, in ways that I find really distressing, and an awful lot of it is the hedgerows... We're reaching the point where a lot of the English countryside looks just like Iowa - just kind of open space.

Bill Bryson / quote

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09Undated

You don't need a science degree to understand about science. You just need to think about it.

Bill Bryson / quote

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10Undated

There are only three things that can kill a farmer: lightning, rolling over in a tractor, and old age.

Bill Bryson / quote

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11Undated

There'd never been a more advantageous time to be a criminal in America than during the 13 years of Prohibition. At a stroke, the American government closed down the fifth largest industry in the United States - alcohol production - and just handed it to criminals - a pretty remarkable thing to do.

Bill Bryson / quote

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12Undated

We forget just how painfully dim the world was before electricity. A candle, a good candle, provides barely a hundredth of the illumination of a single 100 watt light bulb.

Bill Bryson / quote

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13Undated

Open your refrigerator door, and you summon forth more light than the total amount enjoyed by most households in the 18th century. The world at night, for much of history, was a very dark place indeed.

Bill Bryson / quote

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14Undated

All the things that are part of your heritage make you British - that makes this country what it is. It's part of your history. And here, unlike America, it's still living history.

Bill Bryson / quote

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15Undated

The first book I did - the first successful book - was a kind of a travel book, and publishers in Britain encouraged me to do more.

Bill Bryson / quote

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16Undated

If you drive to, say, Shenandoah National Park, or the Great Smoky Mountains, you'll get some appreciation for the scale and beauty of the outdoors. When you walk into it, then you see it in a completely different way. You discover it in a much slower, more majestic sort of way.

Bill Bryson / quote

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17Undated

Roads get wider and busier and less friendly to pedestrians. And all of the development based around cars, like big sprawling shopping malls. Everything seems to be designed for the benefit of the automobile and not the benefit of the human being.

Bill Bryson / quote

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