Top 500 Bill Bryson Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “I could spend my life arriving each evening in a new city.”

— Bill Bryson

52. “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

53. “Hunters will tell you that a moose is a wily and ferocious forest creature. Nonsense. A moose is a cow drawn by a three-year-old.”

— Bill Bryson

54. “Traveling is more fun – hell, life is more fun – if you can treat it as a series of impulses.”

— Bill Bryson

55. “As the saying goes, it takes all kinds to make the world go around, though perhaps some shouldn’t go quite so far around it as others.”

— Bill Bryson

56. “The process became known as sea-floor spreading. When the crust reached the end of its journey at the boundary with continents, it plunged back into the Earth in a process known as subduction.”

— Bill Bryson

57. “It would be hard to believe that the continuous movement of tectonic plates has no effect on the development of life on earth.”

— Bill Bryson

58. “We forget just how painfully dim the world was before electricity. A candle, a good candle, provides barely a hundredth of the illumination of a single 100 watt light bulb.”

— Bill Bryson

59. “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

60. “The history of epilepsy can be summarised as 4,000 years of ignorance, superstition and stigma followed by 100 years of knowledge, superstition and stigma.”

— Bill Bryson

61. “There are only three things that can kill a farmer: lightning, rolling over in a tractor, and old age.”

— Bill Bryson

62. “The food is excellent. The beer is cold. The sun nearly always shines. There is coffee on every corner. Life doesn’t get much better than this.”

— Bill Bryson

63. “To my mind, the only possible pet is a cow. Cows love you. They will listen to your problems and never ask a thing in return. They will be your friends forever. And when you get tired of them, you can kill and eat them. Perfect.”

— Bill Bryson

64. “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

65. “From an evolutionary point of view, sex is really just a reward mechanism to encourage us to pass on our genetic material.”

— Bill Bryson

66. “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

67. “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

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

— Bill Bryson

69. “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

70. “The Forest Service is truly an extraordinary institution. A lot of people, seeing that word forest in the title, assume it has something to do with looking after trees. In fact, no – though that was the original plan.”

— Bill Bryson

71. “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

72. “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

73. “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

74. “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

75. “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

76. “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

77. “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

78. “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

79. “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

80. “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

81. “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

82. “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

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

— Bill Bryson

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

— Bill Bryson

85. “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

86. “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

87. “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

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

— Bill Bryson

89. “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

90. “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

91. “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

92. “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

93. “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

94. “Norfolk has a long-standing reputation for inbreeding. As my son Sam used to say: “Norfolk: too many people, not enough surnames.” I am not for a moment suggesting that the rumors are entirely true, but I will say that when the police do DNA checks after crimes they sometimes have to arrest as many as twelve thousand people.”

— Bill Bryson

95. “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

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

— Bill Bryson

97. “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

98. “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

99. “It seems madness to think that a society would rate marginal economic growth above a livable earth, but there you are. I had always assumed the reason to build a bigger economy was to make the world a better place. In fact, it appears, the reason to build a bigger economy is, well, to build a bigger economy.”

— Bill Bryson

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

— Bill Bryson