Quote

English is full of booby traps for the unwary foreigner. Any language where the unassuming word fly signifies an annoying insect, a means of travel, and a critical part of a gentleman's apparel is clearly asking to be mangled.

Bill Bryson

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Bill Bryson
Age: 72
Born: 1951
Born: December 8
Author
Autobiographer
Journalist
Science Communicator
Science Writer
Travel Writer
Writer
Des Moines
Iowa
William Bryson
William Bill McGuire Bryson
William McGuire Bryson
Language
Gentleman
Signifies
Means
Clearly
Foreigner
Part
English
Apparel
Mean
Critical
Insect
Travel
Foreigners
Unwary
Asking
Insects
Booby
Full
Traps
Mangled
Word
Annoying
Unassuming

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Black bears rarely attack. But here's the thing. Sometimes they do. All bears are agile, cunning and immensely strong, and they are always hungry. If they want to kill you and eat you, they can, and pretty much whenever they want. That doesn't happen often, but - and here is the absolutely salient point - once would be enough.
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The great failure in education, much of the time, is the lack of excitement and stimulus
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That's the trouble with losing your mind by the time it's gone, it's too late to get it back.
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Physicists are atoms' way of thinking about atoms.
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You may find that your parents are the most delightful people, but you don't want to live with them.
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England was full of words I'd never heard before - streaky bacon, short back and sides, Belisha beacon, serviettes, high tea, ice-cream cornet.
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Physics is really nothing more than a search for ultimate simplicity, but so far all we have is a kind of elegant messiness.
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Everywhere throughout New England you find old, tumbledown field walls, often in the middle of the deepest, most settled- looking woods- a reminder of just how swiftly nature reclaims the land in America.
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In terms of adaptability, humans are pretty amazingly useless.
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Everything seems to be designed for the benefit of the automobile and not the benefit of the human being.
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There are only three things that can kill a farmer: lightning, rolling over in a tractor, and old age.
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There is more difference between a zebra and a horse, or between a dolphin and a porpoise, than there is between you and the furry creatures your distant ancestors left behind when they set out to take over the world.
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I love the feeling of being anonymous in a city I've never been before.
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I come Des Moines. Somebody had to.
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... 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.
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There are things you just can't do in life. You can't beat the phone company, you can't make a waiter see you until he's ready to see you, and you can't go home again.
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It is always quietly thrilling to find yourself looking at a world you know well but have never seen from such an angle before.
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There is something about the momentum of travel that makes you want to just keep moving, to never stop.
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The upshot of all this is that we live in a universe whose age we can't quite compute, surrounded by stars whose distances we don't altogether know, filled with matter we can't identify, operating in conformance with physical laws whose properties we don’t truly understand.
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English grammar is so complex and confusing for the one very simple reason that its rules and terminology are based on Latin, a language with which it has precious little in common.
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