803 Quotes by Bill Bryson

We have body clocks not just in the brain but all over – in our pancreas, liver, heart, kidneys, fatty tissue, muscle, virtually everywhere – and these operate to their own timetables, dictating when hormones are released or organs are busiest or most relaxed. Your reflexes, for instance, are at their sharpest in mid-afternoon, while blood pressure peaks toward evening. Men tend to pump more testosterone early in the morning than later in the day.

If this book has a lesson, it is that we are awfully lucky to be here-and by ‘we’ I mean every living thing. To attain any kind of life in this universe of ours appears to be quite an achievement. As humans we are doubly lucky, of course: We enjoy not only the privilege of existence but also the singular ability to appreciate it and even, in a multitude of ways, to make it better. It is a talent we have only barely begun to grasp.

We live in a world that has practically no appreciation for quality, tradition, or classiness, and in which people who can’t spell even common words get to decide what survives. That.

Almost three-quarters of the forty million antibiotic prescriptions written each year in the United States are for conditions that cannot be cured with antibiotics.

The rooms were small and airless and cramped. To make matters worse, somebody in our group was making the most dreadful silent farts. Fortunately, it was me, so I wasn’t nearly as bothered as the others.

Although there was no reliable way of dating periods, there was no shortage of people willing to try. The most well known early attempt30 was made in 1650, when Archbishop James Ussher of the Church of Ireland made a careful study of the Bible and other historical sources and concluded, in a hefty tome called Annals of the Old Testament, that the Earth had been created at midday on 23 October 4004 BC, an assertion that has amused historians and textbook writers ever since.

And now the state was about to bring the law back, proving conclusively that the danger for Tennesseans isn’t so much that they may be descended from apes as overtaken by them.

Life emerged so swiftly, in fact, that some authorities think it must have had help – perhaps a good deal of help.

When I asked her once why she didn’t walk to the gym and do five minutes less on the treadmill, she looked at me as if I were being willfully provocative. “Because I have a program for the treadmill,” she explained. “It records my distance and speed, and I can adjust it for degree of difficulty.” It hadn’t occurred to me how thoughtlessly deficient nature is in this regard.