Top 500 Bill Bryson Quotes (2023 Update)
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51. “The best that can be said for Norwegian television is that it gives you the sensation of a coma without the worry and inconvenience.”

— Bill Bryson

52. “There is a phenomenon called Trail Magic, known and spoken of with reverence by everyone who hikes the trail, which holds that often when things look darkest some little piece of serendipity comes along to put you back on a heavenly plane.”

— Bill Bryson

53. “I wanted to quit and to do this forever, sleep in a bed and in a tent, see what was over the next hill and never see a hill again. All of this all at once, every moment, on the trail or off.”

— Bill Bryson

54. “The complexities of the English language are such that even native speakers cannot always communicate effectively, as almost every American learns on his first day in Britain.”

— Bill Bryson

55. “There is more difference between a zebra and a horse, or between a dolphin and a porpoise, than there is between you and the furry creatures your distant ancestors left behind when they set out to take over the world.”

— Bill Bryson

56. “Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments.” This is the famous study by David Dunning and Justin Kruger of Cornell University in New York mentioned a few chapters ago that launched the new science of what we might call Stupidology. It.”

— Bill Bryson

57. “I really enjoy going to a library and spending the day doing research – to me that is the most pleasurable part of writing the science book.”

— Bill Bryson

58. “What is it about maps? I could look at them all day, earnestly studying the names of towns and villages I have never heard of and will never visit...”

— Bill Bryson

59. “If ever there was an event that challenges the concept of intelligent design, it is the act of childbirth. No woman, however devout, has ever in childbirth said, “Thank you, Lord, for thinking this through for me.”

— Bill Bryson

60. “The tearoom lady called me love. All the shop ladies called me love and most of the men called me mate. I hadn’t been here twelve hours and already they loved me.”

— Bill Bryson

61. “My mother only ever said two things. She said,‘I don’t know, dear.’And she said,’Can I get you a sandwich, honey?”

— Bill Bryson

62. “It was an especially wonderful time to be a noisy moron.”

— Bill Bryson

63. “The number of people on whose cooperative efforts your eventual existence depends has risen to approximately 1,000,000,000,000,000,000, which is several thousand times the total number of people who have ever lived.”

— Bill Bryson

64. “Everywhere throughout New England you find old, tumbledown field walls, often in the middle of the deepest, most settled- looking woods- a reminder of just how swiftly nature reclaims the land in America.”

— Bill Bryson

65. “There is no such thing, incidentally, as one kudo.”

— Bill Bryson

66. “I became quietly seized with that nostalgia that overcomes you when you have reached the middle of your life and your father has recently died and it dawns on you that when he went he took some of you with him.”

— Bill Bryson

67. “When you consider it from a human perspective, and clearly it would be difficult for us to do otherwise, life is an odd thing. It couldn’t wait to get going, but then, having gotten going, it seemed in very little hurry to move on.”

— Bill Bryson

68. “The first book I did – the first successful book – was a kind of a travel book, and publishers in Britain encouraged me to do more.”

— Bill Bryson

69. “Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, which states that the electron is a particle but a particle that can be described in terms of waves.”

— Bill Bryson

70. “Sometimes the world just isn’t ready for a good idea.”

— Bill Bryson

71. “What a joy walking is. All the cares of life, all the hopeless, inept fuckwits that God has strewn along the Bill Bryson Highway of Life suddenly seem far away and harmless, and the world becomes tranquil and welcoming and good.”

— Bill Bryson

72. “There is no reason why we shouldn’t be able to split an infinitive, any more than we should forsake instant coffee and air travel because they weren’t available to the Romans.”

— Bill Bryson

73. “The real problem you get with humour is that you only have so many kinds of jokes within you, and you mine that vein a lot. This isn’t just common to me; it’s anybody who’s funny.”

— Bill Bryson

74. “Perhaps it’s my natural pessimism, but it seems that an awfully large part of travel these days is to see things while you still can.”

— Bill Bryson

75. “Maine is wonderful. It can be very hard. I mean, if you look at the profile maps it doesn’t look it, but somehow when you get out there it’s really steep and hard.”

— Bill Bryson

76. “America is a great disappointment to me. As I said in one of my books, other societies create civilisations; we build shopping malls.”

— Bill Bryson

77. “Our seams don’t burst, we don’t spontaneously sprout leaks,” says Nina Jablonski, professor of anthropology at Penn State University, who is the doyenne of all things cutaneous.”

— Bill Bryson

78. “To an American the whole purpose of living, the one constant confirmation of continued existence, is to cram as much as sensual pleasure as possible into one’s mouth more or less continuously. Gratification, instant and lavish, is a birthright.”

— Bill Bryson

79. “An interesting thing about touch is that the brain doesn’t just tell you how something feels, but how it ought to feel. That’s why the caress of a lover feels wonderful, but the same touch by a stranger would feel creepy or horrible. It’s also why it is so hard to tickle yourself.”

— Bill Bryson

80. “Traveling makes you realize what an immeasurably nice place much of America could be if only people possessed the same instinct for preservation as they do in Europe.”

— Bill Bryson

81. “Everything seems to be designed for the benefit of the automobile and not the benefit of the human being.”

— Bill Bryson

82. “Italians are entirely without any commitment to order. They live their lives in a kind of pandemonium, which I find very attractive.”

— Bill Bryson

83. “I hadn’t realized quite how extraordinary Charles Lindbergh’s achievement was in flying the Atlantic alone. He had never flown over open water before, but he flew straight to Dingle Bay in Ireland and then on to Paris, exactly as planned.”

— Bill Bryson

84. “It wasn’t until we dropped him at his university dormitory and left him there looking touchingly lost and bewildered amid an assortment of cardboard boxes and suitcases in a spartan room not unlike a prison cell that it really hit home that he was vanishing out of our lives and into his own.”

— Bill Bryson

85. “I often feel I’m a disappointment to people because they expect me to be the guy in the books. When I sit next to someone at a dinner party I can see they expect me to be quick and witty, and I’m not at all.”

— Bill Bryson

86. “Yugoslavian hotel: “The flattening of underwear with pleasure is the job of the chambermaid. Turn to her straightaway.”

— Bill Bryson

87. “That’s the trouble with losing your mind; by the time it’s gone, it’s too late to get it back.”

— Bill Bryson

88. “Distance changes utterly when you take the world on foot. A mile becomes a long way, two miles literally considerable, ten miles whopping, fifty miles at the very limits of conception.”

— Bill Bryson

89. “The physicist Leo Szilard once announced to his friend Hans Bethe that he was thinking of keeping a diary: ‘I don’t intend to publish. I am merely going to record the facts for the information of God.’ ‘Don’t you think God knows the facts?’ Bethe asked. ‘Yes,’ said Szilard. ‘He knows the facts, but He does not know this version of the facts.’ Hans Christian von Baeyer, Taming the Atom.”

— Bill Bryson

90. “You have your whole life ahead of you. But here’s the thing to remember. You will always have your whole life ahead of you. That never stops and you shouldn’t forget it.”

— Bill Bryson

91. “A year in Vermont, according to an old saw, is “nine months of winter followed by three months of very poor sledding.”

— Bill Bryson

92. “In terms of adaptability, humans are pretty amazingly useless.”

— Bill Bryson

93. “Daniel Boone, who not only wrestled bears but tried to date their sisters, described corners of the southern Appalachians as “so wild and horrid that it is impossible to behold them without terror.”

— Bill Bryson

94. “Christmas tree stands are the work of the devil and they want you dead.”

— Bill Bryson

95. “Physics is really nothing more than a search for ultimate simplicity, but so far all we have is a kind of elegant messiness.”

— Bill Bryson

96. “English is full of booby traps for the unwary foreigner. Any language where the unassuming word fly signifies an annoying insect, a means of travel, and a critical part of a gentleman’s apparel is clearly asking to be mangled.”

— Bill Bryson

97. “The most remarkable part of all is your DNA. You have a metre of it packed into every cell, and so many cells that if you formed all the DNA in your body into a single fine strand it would stretch ten billion miles, to beyond Pluto. Think of it: there is enough of you to leave the solar system. You are in the most literal sense cosmic.”

— Bill Bryson

98. “All over America today people would be dragging themselves to work, stuck in traffic jams, wreathed in exhaust smoke. I was going for a walk in the woods.”

— Bill Bryson

99. “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

100. “I mused for a few moments on the question of which was worse, to lead a life so boring that you are easily enchanted, or a life so full of stimulus that you are easily bored.”

— Bill Bryson