Top 500 Bill Bryson Quotes (2026 Update)
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451. “I often use alcohol as an artificial check on my skills.”

— Bill Bryson

452. “I ordered a coffee and a little something to eat and savored the warmth and dryness. Somewhere in the background Nat King Cole sang a perky tune. I watched the rain beat down on the road outside and told myself that one day this would be twenty years ago.”

— Bill Bryson

453. “America is a very seductive place in terms of lifestyle and comfort, but it wasn’t for me.”

— Bill Bryson

454. “Indeed, if not told to live – if not given some kind of active instruction from another cell – cells automatically kill themselves. Cells need a lot of reassurance.”

— Bill Bryson

455. “We are the only creature that can harm at a distance.”

— Bill Bryson

456. “Hutton noticed that if he used a pencil to connect points of equal height, it all became much more orderly. Indeed, one could instantly get a sense of the overall shape and slope of the mountain. He had invented contour lines.”

— Bill Bryson

457. “Have you ever seen Glenn Beck in operation? It is the most terrifying thing. It’s so bad that you think he’s going to announce in a minute that it’s all a great con. He makes Sarah Palin look reasonable and steady.”

— Bill Bryson

458. “In 1956 he was found to be carrying a large and diversified collection of pornographic material, and he was invited to take his sordid continental habits elsewhere. Thus he was unable to enjoy, as it were, his own finest erection.”

— Bill Bryson

459. “It’s a funny thing because Britain was in a terrible state in those days. It limped from crisis to crisis. It was known as the Sick Man of Europe. It was in every way poorer than now. Yet there were flower beds in roundabouts, libraries and post offices in every village, cottage hospitals in abundance, council housing for all who needed it. It was a country so comfortable and enlightened that hospitals maintained cricket pitches for their staff and mental patients lived in Victorian palaces.”

— Bill Bryson

460. “In six years, Hoover circled the globe five times. He lived through the Boxer Rebellion in China, hacked through the jungles of Borneo, rode camels across the red emptiness of Western Australia, rubbed shoulders with Wyatt Earp and Jack London in a Klondike saloon, camped beside the Great Pyramids of Egypt. He had experiences as rich and memorable as any young man has ever enjoyed, and was moved by none of them. In.”

— Bill Bryson

461. “Hoping to settle the matter once and for all, in 1969 food scientists from all over the world convened at ‘An Origin of Corn Conference’ at the University of Illinois, but the debates grew so vituperative and bitter, and at times personal, that the conference broke up in confusion, and no papers from it were ever published.”

— Bill Bryson

462. “Most of what has lived on Earth has left behind no record at all.”

— Bill Bryson

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

— Bill Bryson

464. “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

465. “The ill-fated dodo. Slow, flightless and dangerously trusting, the dodo was driven to extinction just seventy years after first being spotted by European sailors on its island home of Mauritius.”

— Bill Bryson

466. “The older you get the more it seems the world belongs to other people.”

— Bill Bryson

467. “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

468. “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

469. “In nearly every year for at least 250 years, deaths outnumbered births in London.”

— Bill Bryson

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

— Bill Bryson

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

— Bill Bryson

472. “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

473. “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

474. “I can wear a baseball cap; I am entitled to wear a baseball cap. I am genetically pre-disposed to wear a baseball cap, whereas most English people look wrong in a baseball cap.”

— Bill Bryson

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

— Bill Bryson

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

— Bill Bryson

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

— Bill Bryson

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

— Bill Bryson

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

— Bill Bryson

480. “The Dunning-Kruger Effect is essentially being too stupid to appreciate how stupid you are.”

— Bill Bryson

481. “Hobson’s choice is sometimes taken to mean a dilemma or difficult decision, but in fact means no choice at all. It derives from a sixteenth-century Cambridge stable-keeper named Thomas Hobson, who hired out horses on a strict rotation. The customer was allowed to take the one nearest the stable door or none at all.”

— Bill Bryson

482. “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

483. “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

484. “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

485. “I can’t think of anything that excites a greater sense of childlike wonder than to be in a country where you are ignorant of almost everything. Suddenly you are five years old again. You can’t read anything, you have only the most rudimentary sense of how things work, you can’t even reliably cross a street without endangering your life. Your whole existence becomes a series of interesting guesses.”

— Bill Bryson

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

— Bill Bryson

487. “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

488. “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

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. “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

491. “These are all just informed guesses.”

— Bill Bryson

492. “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

493. “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

494. “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

495. “When you feel the sun warm on your back on a summer’s day, it’s really excited atoms you feel. The higher you climb, the fewer molecules there are, and so the fewer collisions between them.”

— Bill Bryson

496. “Simeon Potter notes that when James II first saw St. Paul’s Cathedral he called it amusing, awful, and artificial, and meant that it was pleasing to look at, deserving of awe, and full of skillful artifice.”

— Bill Bryson

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

— Bill Bryson

498. “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

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

— Bill Bryson

500. “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