Top 500 Bill Bryson Quotes (2024 Update)
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451. “In nearly every year for at least 250 years, deaths outnumbered births in London.”

— Bill Bryson

452. “Work expands to fill the time available for its completion,” still known as Parkinson’s Law.”

— Bill Bryson

453. “Thank you,” I said and then abruptly leaned across the counter and with two forked fingers poked him sharply in the eyes. Actually, I didn’t do that. I just imagined it. But imagining it made me feel better. I.”

— Bill Bryson

454. “Every dog on the face of the earth wants me dead.”

— Bill Bryson

455. “I have been told more than once in fact that one of the more trying things about learning to live with the Germans after the war was having to watch them return with their wives and girlfriends to show off the places they had helped to ruin.”

— Bill Bryson

456. “These are all just informed guesses.”

— Bill Bryson

457. “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

458. “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

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

— Bill Bryson

460. “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

461. “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.”

— Bill Bryson

462. “Altogether, 80 percent of all autoimmune diseases occur in women. Hormones are the presumed culprit, but how exactly female hormones trip up the immune system when male hormones don’t is not at all clear.”

— Bill Bryson

463. “The friendliness of Australians – all of it quite sincere and spontaneous, as far as I could ever tell – never ceases to amaze or gratify.”

— Bill Bryson

464. “There is the odd exception, like Albert Einstein, but as a breed, scientists tend not be very good at presenting themselves.”

— Bill Bryson

465. “Owen. He coined the term Dinosauria in 1841. It means ‘terrible lizard’ and was a curiously inapt name.”

— Bill Bryson

466. “The richer the country, the more allergies its citizens get.”

— Bill Bryson

467. “Nearly every aspect of life was subject to some measure of legal restraint. At a local level, you could be fined for letting your ducks wander in the road, for misappropriating town gravel, for having a guest in your house without a permit from the local bailiff.”

— Bill Bryson

468. “It is fairly amazing to reflect that at the beginning of the twentieth century, and for some years beyond, the best scientific minds in the world couldn’t actually tell you, in any meaningful way, where babies came from.”

— Bill Bryson

469. “On the fourth night, just as I was facing the dismal prospect of finishing my only book and thereafter having nothing to do in the evenings but lie in the half light and listen to Katz snore, I was delighted, thrilled, sublimely gratified to find that some earlier user had left a Graham Greene paperback. If there’s one thing the AT teaches, it is low level ecstasy, something we can all do with more of in our lives.”

— Bill Bryson

470. “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

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

— Bill Bryson

472. “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

473. “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

474. “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

475. “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

476. “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

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

— Bill Bryson

478. “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

479. “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

480. “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

481. “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

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

— Bill Bryson

483. “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

484. “Blenheim Palace, home of the Dukes of Marlborough, whose achievements over the last eleven generations could be inscribed with a Sharpie on the side of a peanut.”

— Bill Bryson

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

— Bill Bryson

486. “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

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

— Bill Bryson

488. “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

489. “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

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

— Bill Bryson

491. “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

492. “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

493. “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

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

— Bill Bryson

495. “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

496. “We’re sending ye tae Wapping, ye soft English nancies, and if ye wairk very, very hard and if ye doonae git on ma tits, then mebbe I’ll not cut off yer knackers and put them in ma Christmas pudding. D’ye have any problems with tha’?”

— Bill Bryson

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

— Bill Bryson

498. “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

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

— Bill Bryson

500. “I sat there for some time, a young man with more on his mind than in it.”

— Bill Bryson