Pasqualinos Bryson Quotes

Our eyes contain two types of photoreceptors for vision - rods, which help us see in dim conditions but provide no color, and cones, which work when the light is bright and divide the world up into three colors: blue, green, and red. People who are "color-blind" normally lack one of the three types of cones, so they don't see all the colors, just some of them. People who have no cones at all, and are genuinely color-blind, are called achromatopes. Their main problem isn't that their world is pallid but that they really struggle to cope with bright light and can be literally blinded by daylight. Because we were once nocturnal, our ancestors gave up some color acuity - that is, sacrificed cones for rods - to gain better night vision. Much later, primates re-evolved the ability to see reds and oranges, the better to identify ripe fruit, but we still have just three kinds of color receptors compared with four for birds, fish, and reptiles. It's a humbling fact, but virtually all nonmammalian creatures live in a visually richer world than we do. ~ Bill Bryson

From an evolutionary point of view, sex is really just a reward mechanism to encourage us to pass on our genetic material. ~ Bill Bryson

Furthermore, they must learn not to make the elementary mistake of assuming that because a word contains a negative suffix or prefix it is necessarily a negative word. In-, for instance, almost always implies negation but not with invaluable, while -less is equally negative, as a rule, but not with priceless. ~ Bill Bryson

In short, the remarkable position in which we find ourselves is that we don't actually know what we actually know. In ~ Bill Bryson

It occurred to me that never again would he be seven years, one month and six days old, so we had better catch these moments while we can. ~ Bill Bryson

When we peer into the distance some of the galaxies we see may simply be reflections, ghost images created by rebounded light. ~ Bill Bryson

I'm quite certain that if the rest of the world vanished overnight and the development of cricket were left in Australian hands, within a generation, the players would be wearing shorts and using the bats to hit each other, and the thing is, it'd be a much better game for it. ~ Bill Bryson

Columbus real achievement was managing to cross the ocean successfully in both directions. Though an accomplished enough mariner, he was not terribly good at a great deal else, especially geography, the skill that would seem most vital in an explorer. ~ Bill Bryson

The tiniest deviation from any of these evolutionary imperatives and you might now be licking algae from cave walls or lolling walrus-like on some stony shore or disgorging air through a blowhole in the top of your head before diving sixty feet for a mouthful of delicious sandworms. Not ~ Bill Bryson

The current best estimate for the Earth's weight is 5.9725 billion trillion tonnes, ~ Bill Bryson

Is it raining out?' the reception girl asked brightly as I filled in the registration card between sneezes and pauses to wipe water from my face with the back of my arm. 'No, my ship sank and I had to swim the last seven miles. ~ Bill Bryson

The romance of travel wasn't always terribly evident to those who were actually experiencing it. ~ Bill Bryson

Robert G. Elliott was not a murderous person by nature, but he proved, no doubt to his own surprise, to be rather good at killing people. ~ Bill Bryson

Because they are so long-lived, atoms really get around. Every atom you possess has almost certainly passed through several stars and been part of millions of organisms on its way to becoming you. We are each so atomically numerous and so vigorously recycled at death that a significant number of our atoms - up to a billion for each of us, it has been suggested - probably once belonged to Shakespeare. A billion more each came from Buddha and Genghis Khan and Beethoven, and any other historical figure you care to name. (The personages have to be historical, apparently, as it takes the atoms some decades to become thoroughly redistributed; however much you may wish it, you are not yet one with Elvis Presley.) So we are all reincarnations - though short-lived ones. When we die our atoms will disassemble and move off to find new uses elsewhere - as part of a leaf or other human being or drop of dew. Atoms, however, go on practically forever. ~ Bill Bryson

If all the ice sheets melted, sea levels would rise by 60 metres - the height of a twenty-storey building - and every coastal city in the world would be inundated. ~ Bill Bryson

Electric jugs for all. ~ Bill Bryson

Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments. This is the famous study by David Dunning and Justin Kruger of Cornell University in New York mentioned a few chapters ago that launched the new science of what we might call Stupidology. It ~ Bill Bryson

Simeon Potter notes that when James II first saw St. Paul's Cathedral he called it amusing, awful, and artificial, and meant that it was pleasing to look at, deserving of awe, and full of skillful artifice. ~ Bill Bryson

The whole of the global economy is based on supplying the cravings of two per cent of the world's population. ~ Bill Bryson

His colleague Richard Feynman wanted to call these new basic particles partons16, as in Dolly, but was over-ruled. Instead they became known as quarks. ~ Bill Bryson

By the time I had finished my coffee and returned to the streets, the rain had temporarily abated, but the streets were full of vast puddles where the drains where unable to cope with the volume of water. Correct me if I'm wrong, but you would think that if one nation ought by now to have mastered the science of drainage, Britain would be it. ~ Bill Bryson

Second, you are alive. For the tiniest moment in the span of eternity you have the miraculous privilege to exist. ~ Bill Bryson

I understand cricket - what's going on, the scoring - but I can't understand why. ~ Bill Bryson

Much as I hate to stand out in a crowd, I have this terrible occasional compulsion to make myself a source of merriment for the world, and I had come close to sealing new heights with a Russian hat. Now, clearly, that would be unnecessary. ~ Bill Bryson

Not every visitor was enchanted. William Morris, the future designer and aesthete, then aged seventeen, was so appalled by what he saw as the exhibition's lack of taste and veneration of excess that he staggered from the building and was sick in the bushes. ~ Bill Bryson

Anyway, we did it," Katz said at last, looking up. He noted my quizzical expression.
"Hiked Maine, I mean."
I looked at him. "Stephen, we didn't even see Mount Katahdin."
He dismissed this as a petty quibble. "Another mountain," he said. "How many do you need to see, Bryson?"
I snorted a small laugh. "Well, that's one way of looking at it."
"It's the only way of looking at it," Katz went on and quite earnestly. "As far as I'm concerned, I hiked the Appalachian Trail. I hiked it in snow and I hiked it in heat. I hiked
it in the South and I hiked in the North. I hiked it till my feet bled. I hiked the Appalachian Trail, Bryson."
"We missed out a lot of it, you know."
"Details," Katz sniffed. ~ Bill Bryson

Shakespeare 'never owned a book,' a writer for the New York Times gravely informed readers in one doubting article in 2002. The statement cannot actually be refuted, for we know nothing about his incidental possessions. But the writer might just as well have suggested that Shakespeare never owned a pair of shoes or pants. For all the evidence tells us, he spent his life naked from the waist down, as well as bookless, but it is probably that what is lacking is the evidence, not the apparel or the books. ~ Bill Bryson

There is a whole genre of funny travel writers - that's very popular. There's Bill Bryson and people who follow that route and sell travel writing through making people laugh. It's a very difficult group to take. The line between comedy and mockery is sometimes a bit thin. ~ John Gimlette

The basic challenge of any book is you know you're going to be working on it for three or four years or more. So you want to have a subject that will keep you engaged. ~ Bill Bryson

If you wish to end up as a moderately advanced, thinking society, you need to be at the right end of a very long chain of outcomes involving reasonable periods of stability interspersed with just the right amount of stress and challenge (ice ages appear to be especially helpful in this regard) and marked by a total absence of real cataclysm. As ~ Bill Bryson

the slight evolutionary change that pushed man's larynx deeper into his throat, and thus made choking a possibility, also brought with it the possibility of sophisticated, well-articulated speech. ~ Bill Bryson

I ordered a coffee and a little something to eat and savored the warmth and dryness. Somewhere in the background Nat King Cole sang a perky tune. I watched the rain beat down on the road outside and told myself that one day this would be twenty years ago. ~ Bill Bryson

There is no point in hurrying because you are not actually going anywhere. However far or long you plod, you are always in the same place: in the woods. ~ Bill Bryson

Somebody needs to explain to me why it is that the one thing your body can suddenly do well when you get old is grow hair in your nose and ears. It's like God is playing a terrible, cruel joke on you, as if he is saying, Well, Bill, the bad news is that from now on you are going to be barely continent, lose your faculties one by one, and have sex about once every lunar eclipse, but the good news is that you can braid your nostrils. ~ Bill Bryson

Still, I never really mind bad service in a restaurant. It makes me feel better about not leaving a tip. ~ Bill Bryson

John was prosecuted (or threatened with prosecution - the records are sometimes a touch unclear) for trading in wool and for money-lending, both highly illegal activities. ~ Bill Bryson

Report in The Economist as much as 97 per cent of the world's plant and animal species may still await discovery. Of ~ Bill Bryson

I can't think of anything that excites a greater sense of childlike wonder than to be in a country where you are ignorant of almost everything. ~ Bill Bryson

Nothing gives the English more pleasure, in a quiet but determined sort of way, than to do things oddly. ~ Bill Bryson

Was just very compact, not much larger than a standard wardrobe. But it was a marvel of ergonomics. It included ~ Bill Bryson

To be here now, alive in the twenty-first century and smart enough to know it, you also had to be the beneficiary of an extraordinary string of biological good fortune. ~ Bill Bryson

Queen Elizabeth, in a much-cited quote, faithfully bathed once a month "whether she needs it or no. ~ Bill Bryson

Am not at all sure how we should tackle such a crisis, but on the basis of what we know so far, I would suggest, as a start, quarantining Texas. I ~ Bill Bryson

Even today our knowledge of the ocean floors remains remarkably low resolution. ~ Bill Bryson

Victorian rigidities were such that ladies were not even allowed to blow out candles in mixed company, as that required them to pucker their lips suggestively. They could not say that they were going "to bed"
that planted too stimulating an image
but merely that they were "retiring." It became effectively impossible to discuss clothing in even a clinical sense without resort to euphemisms. Trousers became "nether integuments" or simply "inexpressibles" and underwear was "linen." Women could refer among themselves to petticoats or, in hushed tones, stockings, but could mention almost nothing else that brushed bare flesh. ~ Bill Bryson

Perhaps nothing speaks more eloquently of the variability of spelling in the age than the fact that a dictionary published in 1604, A Table Alphabeticall of Hard Words, spelled "words" two ways on the title page. ~ Bill Bryson

There is no such thing, incidentally, as one kudo. ~ Bill Bryson

This is comfortable and clean and familiar. Apart from a tendency among men of a certain age to wear knee-high socks with shorts, these people are just like you and me. ~ Bill Bryson

An atmosphere ultraviolet rays from the sun, even from a weak sun, would have tended to break apart any incipient bonds made by molecules. And yet right there" - she tapped the stromatolites - "you have organisms almost at the surface. It's a puzzle. ~ Bill Bryson