Top 500 Bill Bryson Quotes (2024 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. “From an evolutionary point of view, sex is really just a reward mechanism to encourage us to pass on our genetic material.”

— Bill Bryson

53. “Taking a scenic route in Southeast Iowa is like talking about a good Barry Manilow album. You have to make certain allowances.”

— Bill Bryson

54. “Take a moment from time to time to remember that you are alive. I know this sounds a trifle obvious, but it is amazing how little time we take to remark upon this singular and gratifying fact. By the most astounding stroke of luck an infinitesimal portion of all the matter in the universe came together to create you and for the tiniest moment in the great span of eternity you have the incomparable privilege to exist.”

— Bill Bryson

55. “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

56. “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

57. “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

58. “1905. In that year, Einstein published three papers that revolutionized physics. In the same year he was turned down for two teaching jobs.”

— Bill Bryson

59. “Survival on Earth is a surprisingly tricky business. Of the billions and billions of species of living thing that have existed since the dawn of time, most – 99.99 percent – are no longer around. Life on Earth, you see, is not only brief but dismayingly tenuous. It is a curious feature of our existence that we come from a planet that is very good at promoting life but even better at extinguishing it.”

— Bill Bryson

60. “For the universe to exist as it does requires that hydrogen be converted to helium in a precise but comparatively stately manner. Tweak the numbers even slightly and we would not be here. Optical.”

— Bill Bryson

61. “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

62. “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

63. “We are only beginning to understand the importance and nature of a woman’s vaginal microbiome. Babies born by Cesarean section are robbed of this initial wash. The consequences for the baby can be profound. Various studies have found that people born by C-section have substantially increased risks for type 1 diabetes, asthma, celiac disease, and even obesity and an eightfold greater risk of developing allergies.”

— Bill Bryson

64. “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

65. “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

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. “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

68. “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

69. “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

70. “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

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

— Bill Bryson

72. “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

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

— Bill Bryson

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

— Bill Bryson

75. “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

76. “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

77. “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

78. “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

79. “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

80. “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

81. “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

82. “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

83. “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

84. “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

85. “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

86. “I was particularly taken with an article about a pub called the White Post on Rimpton Hill on the Dorset–Somerset border. The county boundary runs right through the middle of the bar. In former times when Dorset and Somerset had different licensing laws, people had to move from one side of the room to the other at 10 pm in order to continue drinking legally until 10.30. I don’t know why but this made me feel a pang of nostalgia for the way things used to be.”

— Bill Bryson

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

— Bill Bryson

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

— Bill Bryson

89. “Linguist say parties in the conversation will tolerate silence for four seconds before interjecting anything, however unrelated.”

— Bill Bryson

90. “We have only thermal sensors to guide us, which is why when you sit down on a wet spot, you can’t generally tell whether it really is wet or just cold.”

— Bill Bryson

91. “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

92. “Thomas Chippendale. His influence was enormous. He was the first commoner for whom a furniture style was named;.”

— Bill Bryson

93. “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

94. “Archbishop James Ussher of the Church of Ireland made a careful study of the Bible and other historical sources and concluded, in a hefty tome called Annals of the Old Testament, that the Earth had been created at midday on 23 October 4004 BC, an assertion.”

— Bill Bryson

95. “Perhaps for our last words on the subject of usage we should turn to the last words of the venerable French grammarian Dominique Bonhours, who proved on his deathbed that a grammarian’s work is never done when he turned to those gathered loyally around him and whispered: “I am about to – or I am going to – die; either expression is used.”

— Bill Bryson

96. “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

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

— Bill Bryson

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

— Bill Bryson

99. “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

100. “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