Top 500 Bill Bryson Quotes (2024 Update)
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451. “We have body clocks not just in the brain but all over – in our pancreas, liver, heart, kidneys, fatty tissue, muscle, virtually everywhere – and these operate to their own timetables, dictating when hormones are released or organs are busiest or most relaxed. Your reflexes, for instance, are at their sharpest in mid-afternoon, while blood pressure peaks toward evening. Men tend to pump more testosterone early in the morning than later in the day.”

— Bill Bryson

452. “And now the state was about to bring the law back, proving conclusively that the danger for Tennesseans isn’t so much that they may be descended from apes as overtaken by them.”

— Bill Bryson

453. “In the United States, frozen cheese pizza is regulated by the Food and Drug Administration. Frozen pepperoni pizza, on the other hand, is regulated by the Department of Agriculture.”

— Bill Bryson

454. “Altogether about 80 percent of the processed foods we eat contain added sugars. Heinz ketchup is almost one-quarter sugar. It has more sugar per unit of volume than Coca-Cola.”

— Bill Bryson

455. “Charles Darwin, driven to desperation by a mysterious lifelong malady that left him chronically lethargic, routinely draped himself with electrified zinc chains, doused his body with vinegar, and glumly underwent hours of pointless tingling in the hope that it would effect some improvement. It never did. The.”

— Bill Bryson

456. “You are totally at the mercy of nature in this country, mate. It’s just a fact of life.”

— Bill Bryson

457. “Returning to my book, I learned that Sarah Palin thought Africa was a country. It was a wonderful evening.”

— Bill Bryson

458. “Because we humans are big and clever enough to produce and utilize antibiotics and disinfectants, it is easy to convince ourselves that we have banished bacteria to the fringes of existence. Don’t you believe it. Bacteria may not build cities or have interesting social lives, but they will be here when the Sun explodes. This is their planet, and we are on it only because they allow us to be.”

— Bill Bryson

459. “You have three chromosomes, Bryson. X, Y, and Fuckhead.” – Katz.”

— Bill Bryson

460. “Americans alive today each have about 625 times more lead in their blood than people did a century ago.”

— Bill Bryson

461. “Dying is, to coin a phrase, the last thing your body wants to do.”

— Bill Bryson

462. “There is no question that a Neanderthal could easily beat us up. So, too, presumably could their women, which may be why we are only 2 percent Neanderthal instead of 50 percent. Those bitches were too scary for us.”

— Bill Bryson

463. “The sciences are sometimes likened to different levels of a tall building: logic in the basement, mathematics on the ground floor, then particle physics, then the rest of physics and chemistry, and so forth, all the way up to psychology, sociology – and the economists in the penthouse.”

— Bill Bryson

464. “The waitress, seeing how much I had left, asked me if I wanted a doggie bag. ‘No thank you,’ I said through a thin smile, ‘I don’t believe I could find a dog that would eat it.”

— Bill Bryson

465. “Well, you blink fourteen thousand times a day – so much that your eyes are shut for twenty-three minutes of every waking day.”

— Bill Bryson

466. “England?” she said with unreserved amazement. “Why do you live in England?” “Because it is nothing like Indianapolis.”

— Bill Bryson

467. “Most people think they want Main Streets but won’t make the small sacrifices in terms of time, cost, and footpower necessary to sustain them. The sad fact is that we have created a culture in which most people will happily-indeed, unthinkingly-drive an extra couple of miles to walk thirty less feet.”

— Bill Bryson

468. “We clambered for hours up vast, perpendicular slopes, over clattering scree and lumpy tussocks, round towering citadels of rock, and emerged at length into a cold, bleak, lofty nether world so remote and forbidding that even the sheep were startled to see us.”

— Bill Bryson

469. “Someone needs to explain to me how it is that the richer Britain gets, the poorer it thinks itself. All.”

— Bill Bryson

470. “The World Wide Web is a CERN offshoot. It was invented by a CERN scientist, Tim Berners-Lee, in 1989. 2.”

— Bill Bryson

471. “He left to do whatever editors do.”

— Bill Bryson

472. “It was so bad, it was worth more than we paid.”

— Bill Bryson

473. “In three minutes, 98 percent of all the matter there is or will ever be has been produced. We have a universe. It is a place of the most wondrous and gratifying possibility, and beautiful, too. And it was all done in about the time it takes to make a sandwich.”

— Bill Bryson

474. “It is only the brevity of lifetimes that keeps us from appreciating the changes.”

— Bill Bryson

475. “An is indisputably correct before just four words beginning with ‘h’: hour, honest, honour and heir.”

— Bill Bryson

476. “All that is required of you is a willingness to trudge. There is no point in hurrying because you are not actually going anywhere. However far or long you trod you are always in the same place – in the woods. It’s where you were yesterday, where you will be tomorrow.”

— Bill Bryson

477. “Look, if you draw a two thousand-mile-long line across the United States at any angle, it’s going to pass through nine murder victims.”

— Bill Bryson

478. “There is a certain irony in the fact that Britain gave the world nearly all its most important geological names – Devonian, Cambrian, Silurian, Ordovician – but that the one epoch that everybody knows about is named for the Jura Mountains in France, even though the Dorset coast is actually the best place in the world to see Jurassic outcrops.”

— Bill Bryson

479. “I somberly reflected that the history of the Highlands is five hundred years of cruelty and bloodshed followed by two hundred years of way too much bagpipe music.”

— Bill Bryson

480. “Incidentally, the idea that we use only 10 percent of our brains is a myth. No one knows where the idea came from, but it has never been true or close to true. You may not use it all terribly sensibly, but you employ all your brain in one way or another.”

— Bill Bryson

481. “It was a lot more fun to get famous than to be famous.”

— Bill Bryson

482. “We live in a world that has practically no appreciation for quality, tradition, or classiness, and in which people who can’t spell even common words get to decide what survives. That.”

— Bill Bryson

483. “We don’t know if he ever left England. We don’t know who his principal companions were or how he amused himself. His sexuality is an irreconcilable mystery. On only a handful of days in his life can we say with absolute certainty where he was.”

— Bill Bryson

484. “There is almost no area of British life that isn’t touched with a kind of genius for names.”

— Bill Bryson

485. “Charles Darwin announced that the geological processes that created the Weald, an area of southern England stretching across Kent, Surrey and Sussex, had taken, by his calculations, 306, 662, 400 years to complete.”

— Bill Bryson

486. “And it is all the more extraordinary when you reflect that despite perpetually modest funding Britain still has three of the world’s top ten universities and eleven of the top one hundred. Put another way, Britain has 1 percent of the world’s population, but 11 percent of its best universities, and accounts for nearly 12 percent of total academic citations and 16 percent of the most highly cited studies. I.”

— Bill Bryson

487. “You discard about a hundred billion red blood cells every day. They are a big component of what makes your stools brown.”

— Bill Bryson

488. “For reasons I couldn’t begin to guess at, a balustrade along the roofline had been adorned with life-sized statues of ordinary men, women and children. Goodness knows what this is meant to suggest – I suppose that this is some sort of Hall of the People – but the effect is that it looks as if two dozen citizens of various ages are about to commit mass suicide.”

— Bill Bryson

489. “The animals we raise for food today are eaten not because they are notably delectable or nutritious or a pleasure to be around, but because they were the ones first domesticated in the Stone Age.”

— Bill Bryson

490. “Part of the power of travel is that you stand a good chance of being hollowed out by it. The lucky come back home complaining about crooked rug merchants and dishonest taxi drivers; the unlucky never come home at all.”

— Bill Bryson

491. “If there is one thing certain about English pronunciation it is that there is almost nothing certain about it. No other language in the world has more words spelled the same way and yet pronounced differently.”

— Bill Bryson

492. “The Moon is slipping from our grasp at a rate of about 1.5 inches a year. In another two billion years it will have receded so far that it won’t keep us steady and we will have to come up with some other solution, but in the meantime you should think of it as much more than just a pleasant feature in the night sky.”

— Bill Bryson

493. “Skull of an early modern human, dating from 90,000 years ago, found at Qafzeh in Israel. Found at the same site were remains of Neandertals, suggesting that here at least the two species coexisted, possibly for thousands of years.”

— Bill Bryson

494. “Never has anyone milked a single thought more vigorously and successfully than he did. The line for which he is remembered was “Work expands to fill the time available for its completion,” still known as Parkinson’s Law. It was first elucidated in a comic essay he wrote for The Economist in 1955 while he was a professor at the University of Malaya in Singapore.”

— Bill Bryson

495. “Louis Agassiz, the Swiss naturalist who became the most outspoken advocate of the idea that much of Earth had once been covered in ice, but alienated many in the process.”

— Bill Bryson

496. “Vesto Slipher, of the Lowell Observatory in Arizona, was the first person to notice that distant galaxies appeared to be moving away from us – evidence that the universe was not, as everyone had long assumed, static.”

— Bill Bryson

497. “Water is everywhere. A potato is 80 percent water, a cow 74 percent, a bacterium 75 percent. A tomato, at 95 percent, is little but water. Even humans are 65 percent water, making us more liquid than solid by a margin of almost two to one.”

— Bill Bryson

498. “If the mattress stains were anything to go by, a previous user had not so much suffered from incontinence as rejoiced in it. He had evidently included the pillow in his celebrations. I lifted it and sniffed it, then wished I hadn’t.”

— Bill Bryson

499. “Getting old is the surest route to dying.”

— Bill Bryson

500. “Kazakhstan, it turns out, was once attached to Norway and New England.”

— Bill Bryson