Top 500 Bill Bryson Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “The most elusive element of all, however, appears to be francium, which is so rare that it is thought that our entire planet may contain, at any given moment, fewer than twenty francium atoms.”

— Bill Bryson

102. “Yellowstone’s eruptions averaged one massive blow every 600,000 years. The last one was 630,000 years ago. Yellowstone, it appears, is due.”

— Bill Bryson

103. “On a Presidential visit to a farm, Mrs. Coolidge asked her guide how many times the rooster copulated daily. “Dozens of times” was the reply. “Please tell that to the President,” Mrs. Coolidge requested. When the President passed the pens and was told about the rooster, he asked: “Same hen every time?” “Oh no, Mr. President, a different one each time.” The President nodded slowly, then said: “Tell that to Mrs. Coolidge.” – london review of books, january 25, 1990.”

— Bill Bryson

104. “The difference between herbs and spices is that herbs come from the leafy part of plants and spices from the wood, seed, fruit, or other nonleafy part.”

— Bill Bryson

105. “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

106. “Hemoglobin has one strange and dangerous quirk: it vastly prefers carbon monoxide to oxygen. If carbon monoxide is present, hemoglobin will pack it in, like passengers on a rush-hour train, and leave the oxygen on the platform. That’s why it kills people.”

— Bill Bryson

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

— Bill Bryson

108. “I am not a religious soul, but I must say it does seem a little uncanny that on that morning of all mornings I should have looked over the bridge at such a propitious moment. I mentioned the story at lunch to one of the members of the cathedral, and he nodded sagely and pointed a finger heavenward, as if to say, ‘It was God, of course.’ I nodded and didn’t say anything, but thought: ‘Then why did He push him in?’ Beyond.”

— Bill Bryson

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

— Bill Bryson

110. “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

111. “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

112. “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

113. “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

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

— Bill Bryson

115. “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

116. “Even Scientific American entered the fray with an article proposing that the person portrayed in the famous Martin Droeshout engraving might actually be – I weep to say it – Elizabeth I.”

— Bill Bryson

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

— Bill Bryson

118. “I remember once reading that the tenth Duke of Marlborough, on a visit to one of his daughter’s homes, announced in consternation from the top of the stairs that his toothbrush wasn’t foaming properly. It turned out that his valet had always put toothpaste on his brush for him, and as a consequence the duke was unaware that dental implements didn’t foam up spontaneously. I rest my case.”

— Bill Bryson

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

— Bill Bryson

120. “But even men far tougher and more attuned to the wilderness than Thoreau were sobered by its strange and palpable menace. 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.” When Daniel Boone is uneasy, you know it’s time to watch your step.”

— Bill Bryson

121. “Where body meets air, we are all cadavers. These outer skin cells are replaced every month. We shed skin copiously, almost carelessly: some twenty-five thousand flakes a minute, over a million pieces every hour. Run a finger along a dusty shelf, and you are in large part clearing a path through fragments of your former self. Silently and remorselessly we turn to dust.”

— Bill Bryson

122. “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

123. “If there’s one thing the AT teaches, it is low-level ecstasy – something we could all do with more of in our lives.”

— Bill Bryson

124. “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

125. “Every atom you possess has almost certainly passed through several stars and been part of millions of organisms on its way to becoming you. We are each so atomically numerous and so vigorously recycled at death that a significant number of our atoms – up to a billion for each of us, it has been suggested – probably once belonged to Shakespeare.”

— Bill Bryson

126. “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

127. “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

128. “Making English grammar conform to Latin rules is like asking people to play baseball using the rules of football.”

— Bill Bryson

129. “If you could fly backwards into the past at the rate of one year per second, it would take you about half an hour to reach the time of Christ, and a little over three weeks to get back to the beginnings of human life. But it would take you twenty years to reach the dawn of the Cambrian period.”

— Bill Bryson

130. “That is the problem with Scotland, I find. You never know whether the next person you meet is going to offer you his bone marrow or nut you with his forehead. Afterward.”

— Bill Bryson

131. “In another widely reported study, the Belly Button Biodiversity Project, conducted by researchers at North Carolina State University, sixty random Americans had their belly buttons swabbed to see what was lurking there microbially. The study found 2,368 species of bacteria, 1,458 of which were unknown to science.”

— Bill Bryson

132. “J. B. S. Haldane once famously observed: “The universe is not only queerer than we suppose; it is queerer than we can suppose.”

— Bill Bryson

133. “Eenie, meenie, minie, mo” is based on a counting system that predates the Roman occupation of Britain, that may even be pre-Celtic. If so, it is a rare surviving link with the very distant past. It not only gives us a fragmentary image of how children were being amused at the time Stonehenge was built, but tells us something about how their elders counted and thought and ordered their speech.”

— Bill Bryson

134. “I was beginning to appreciate that the central feature of life on the Appalachian Trail is deprivation, that the whole point of the experience is to remove yourself so thoroughly from the conveniences of everyday life that the most ordinary things – processed cheese, a can of pop gorgeously beaded with condensation – fill you with wonder and gratitude.”

— Bill Bryson

135. “Every human body consists of about 10 quadrillion cells, but about 100 quadrillion bacterial cells. They are, in short, a big part of us. From the bacteria’s point of view, of course, we are a rather small part of them.”

— Bill Bryson

136. “I had never really stopped to consider what an extraordinary thing the Royal National Lifeboat Institution is. Think about it. A troubled ship calls for help, and eight people – teachers, plumbers, the guy who runs the pub – drop everything and put to sea, whatever the weather, asking no questions, imperilling their own lives, to try to help strangers. Is there anything more brave and noble than that?”

— Bill Bryson

137. “18th century scientists, the French in particular, seldom did things simply if an absurdly demanding alternative was available.”

— Bill Bryson

138. “Shenandoah National Park is lovely. It is possibly the most wonderful national park I have ever been in, and, considering the impossible and conflicting demands put on it, it is extremely well run. Almost at once it became my favorite part of the Appalachian Trail.”

— Bill Bryson

139. “Absolute brain size does not tell you everything or possibly sometimes even much. Elephants and whales both have brains larger than ours, but you wouldn’t have much trouble outwitting them in contract negotiations.”

— Bill Bryson

140. “Just sitting quietly, doing nothing at all, your brain churns through more information in thirty seconds than the Hubble Space Telescope has processed in thirty years. A morsel of cortex one cubic millimeter in size – about the size of a grain of sand – could hold two thousand terabytes of information, enough to store all the movies ever made, trailers included, or about 1.2 billion copies of this book.”

— Bill Bryson

141. “The transit of Venus of 1769 finally allowed us to determine the distance from the Earth to the Sun: 149.59 million kilometres. A.”

— Bill Bryson

142. “There is something about the pace and scale of British life – an appreciation of small pleasures, a kind of restraint with respect to greed, generally speaking – that makes life strangely agreeable. The British really are the only people in the world who become genuinely enlivened when presented with a hot beverage and a small plain biscuit.”

— Bill Bryson

143. “Romans park their cars the way I would park if I had just spilled a beaker of hydrochloric acid on my lap.”

— Bill Bryson

144. “In the countryside, litter doesn’t have a friend. It doesn’t have anybody who’s saying, ‘Wait a minute, this is really starting to get out of control.’”

— Bill Bryson

145. “I’ve said it before in another book, but I believe it’s worth repeating: the only thing special about the elements that make you is that they make you. That is the miracle of life.”

— Bill Bryson

146. “For 2 billion years this is all the life there was on earth, but in that time the stromatolites raised the oxygen level in the atmosphere to 20 percent – enough to allow the development of other, more complex life-forms: me, for instance. My gratitude was real.”

— Bill Bryson

147. “I also said no to a first-aid kit, sewing kit, anti-snake-bite kit, $12 emergency whistle, and small orange plastic shovel for burying one’s poop, on the grounds that these were unnecessary, too expensive, or invited ridicule.”

— Bill Bryson

148. “I’m not funny in person. I mean I’m really not. I’m one of those people who always screw up anecdotes.”

— Bill Bryson

149. “I come Des Moines. Somebody had to.”

— Bill Bryson

150. “That is unquestionably the most astounding thing about us – that we are just a collection of inert components, the same stuff you would find in a pile of dirt. I’ve said it before in another book, but I believe it’s worth repeating: the only thing special about the elements that make you is that they make you. That is the miracle of life.”

— Bill Bryson