70 Quotes by Simon Winchester

Think simple, Murray kept insisting: Think simple.

And that was about all that he really wished the world to know about himself. “I am a nobody,” he would write toward the end of the century, when fame had begun to creep up on him. “Treat me as a solar myth, or an echo, or an irrational quantity, or ignore me altogether.” But.

Jonathan Swift mounted a lifelong attempt to ‘fix our language forever’ – no critic and advocate of immutability has ever once managed properly or even marginally to outwit the English language’s capacity for foxy and relentlessly slippery flexibility.

I’ve come to accept who my readers turn out to be, rather than having some sort of demographic target.

One woman even disparaged Johnson for failing to include obscenities. “No, Madam, I hope I have not daubed my fingers,” he replied, archly. “I find, however, that you have been looking for them.

The agonies that he must have suffered in those terrible asylum nights have granted us all a benefit, for all time. He was mad, and for that, we have reason to be glad. A truly savage irony, on which it is discomfiting to dwell.

The basin of the Mississippi encompasses a good two thirds of the contiguous forty-eight states, thirty-one of which – together with two Canadian provinces – contribute waters to its flow.

2 percent of America’s electricity now goes to keeping the Internet cool, to keeping the link unbroken, for America and for the world.

But to all of this the land itself remain sturdily indifferent and unmoved, the human behavior played out on its surfaces merely trivia. Except, of course, where human behavior induces changes to the ferocity of the weather and the levels of the sea, and land may then fall victim to the climate, and has to alter its shape and size as a result.