EuroHackie

“Just beyond the edge of our property in 1985 a farmer crossing a field found a rare, impossible-to-misconstrue Roman phallic pendant. To me this was, and remains, an amazement: the idea of a man in a toga, standing on what is now the edge of my land, patting himself all over, and realizing with consternation that he has lost his treasured keepsake, which then lay in the soil for seventeen or eighteen centuries - through endless generations of human activity; through the rise of the English language, the birth of the English nation, the development of continuous monarch and all the rest - before finally being picked up by a late-twentieth-century farmer, presumably with a look of consternation of his own.”
― Bill Bryson, At Home: A Short History of Private Life

“For anyone of a rational disposition, fashion is often nearly impossible to fathom. Throughout many periods of history – perhaps most – it can seem as if the whole impulse of fashion has been to look maximally ridiculous. If one could be maximally uncomfortable as well, the triumph was all the greater.”
― Bill Bryson, At Home: A Short History of Private Life

“Originally, the cellar served primarily as a coal store. Today it holds the boiler, idle suitcases, out-of-season sporting equipment, and many sealed cardboard boxes that are almost never opened but are always carefully transferred from house to house with every move in the belief that one day someone might want some baby clothes that have been kept in a box for twenty-five years.”
― Bill Bryson, At Home: A Short History of Private Life

“You can get some sense of the immaterial quality of clouds by strolling through fog—which is, after all, nothing more than a cloud that lacks the will to fly.”
― Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything