Bill Bryson, At Home: A Short History Of Private Life Quotes

It is always quietly thrilling to find yourself looking at a world you know well but have never seen from such an angle before.

Nothing - really, absolutely nothing - says more about Victorian Britain and its capacity for brilliance than that the century's most daring and iconic building was entrusted to a gardener.

Widespread commercial distribution of ice was so new that 300 tons of the precious commodity melted at one port while customs officials tried to figure out how to classify it.

[Americans] were, for one thing, so smitten with the idea of progress that they invented things without having any idea whether those things would be of any use.

The author says the earliest Australian aborigines devoted extraordinary amounts of energy to enterprises no one now can understand.