As my father always used to tell me, 'You see, son, there's always someone in the world worse off than you.' And I always used to think, 'So?

— Bill Bryson

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. Furthermore, it is also little wonder that we have barely begun to understand it.

— Bill Bryson

As we parted at the Natural History Museum in London, I asked Richard Forty how science ensures that when one person goes there's someone ready to take his place. He chuckled rather heartily at my naivete. 'I'm afraid it's not as if we have substitutes sitting on the bench somewhere waiting to be called in to play. When a specialist retires or, even more unfortunately, dies, that can bring a stop to things in that field, sometimes for a very long while.' And I suppose that's why you value someone who spends forty-two years studying a single species of plant, even if it doesn't produce anything terribly new?'' Precisely,' he said, 'precisely.' And he really seemed to mean it.

— Bill Bryson

A third...candidate for Shakespearean authorship was Christopher Marlowe. He was the right age (just two months older than Shakespeare), had the requisite talent, and would certainly have had ample leisure after 1593, assuming he wasn't too dead to work.

— Bill Bryson

…a waitress came out and plonked in front of each of us a small standard terra-cotta flowerpot in which had been baked a little loaf of bread." What's this?" I asked." It's bread," she replied." But it's in a flowerpot?" She gave me a look that I was beginning to think of as the Darwin stare. It was a look that said, "Yeah? So?"" Well, isn't that kind of unusual?" She considered for a moment. "Is a bit, I suppose." "And will we be following a horticultural theme throughout the meal?" Her expression contorted in a deeply pained look, as if she were trying to suck her face into the back of her head. "What?"" Will the main course arrive in a wheelbarrow?" I elaborated helpfully. "Will you be serving the salad with a pitchfork?"" Oh, no. It's just the bread that's special."" I'm so pleased to hear it.

— Bill Bryson

Because of social strictures against even the mildest swearing, America developed a particularly rich crop of euphemistic expletives - darn, turn, gold urn, gosh dad, gosh dang, gosh awful, blast, contain, confound, by Jove, by Ringo, great guns, by the great horn spoon (a nonce term first cited in the Bigelow Papers), joined, jumping Jehoshaphat, and others almost without number - but even this cautious epithets could land people in trouble as late as the 1940s.

— Bill Bryson

Bipedalism is a demanding and risky strategy. It means refashioning the pelvis into a full load-bearing instrument. To preserve the required strength, the birth canal in the female must be comparatively narrow. This has two very significant immediate consequences and one longer-term one. First, it means a lot of pain for any birthing mother and greatly increased danger of fatality to mother and baby both. Moreover, to get the baby's head through such a tight space it must be born while its brain is still small - and while the baby, therefore, is still helpless. This means long-term infant care, which in turn implies solid male-female bonding.

— Bill Bryson

Bulgaria, I reflected as I walked back to the hotel, isn’t a country; it’s a near-death experience.

— Bill Bryson

But that's the glory of foreign travel, as far as I am concerned. I don't want to know what people are talking about. 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. Suddenly you are five years old again. You can't read anything, you have only the most rudimentary sense of how things work, you can't even reliably cross a street without endangering your life. Your whole existence becomes a series of interesting guesses.

— Bill Bryson

By the 1920s if you wanted to work behind a lunch counter you needed to know that 'Noah's boy' was a slice of ham (since Ham was one of Noah’s sons) and that 'burn one' or 'grease spot' designated a hamburger. 'He'll take a chance' or 'clean the kitchen' meant an order of hash, 'Adam and Eve on a raft' was two poached eggs on toast, 'cats' eyes' was tapioca pudding, 'bird seed' was cereal, 'whistle berries' were baked beans, and 'dough well done with cow to cover' was the somewhat labored way of calling for an order of toast and butter. Food that had been waiting too long was said to be 'growing a beard'. Many of these shorthand terms have since entered the mainstream, notably BLT for a bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwich, 'over easy' and 'sunny side up' in respect of eggs, and 'hold' as in 'hold the mayo'.

— Bill Bryson