Top 500 Bill Bryson Quotes (2024 Update)
Page 4 of 10

151. “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

152. “The great failure in education, much of the time, is the lack of excitement and stimulus.”

— Bill Bryson

153. “A native of the southern United States, the warbler was famous for its unusually lovely song, but its population numbers, never robust, gradually dwindled until by the 1930s the warbler vanished altogether and went unseen for many years. Then, in 1939, by happy coincidence two separate birding enthusiasts, in widely separated locations, came across lone survivors just two days apart. They both shot the birds.”

— Bill Bryson

154. “You have no engagements, commitments, obligations, or duties; no special ambitions and only the smallest, least complicated of wants; you exist in a tranquil tedium, serenely beyond the reach of exasperation, “far removed from the seats of strife,” as the early explorer and botanist William Bartram put it. All that is required of you is a willingness to trudge.”

— Bill Bryson

155. “I love a sunburnt country, A land of sweeping plains, Of ragged mountain ranges, Of droughts and flooding rains.”

— Bill Bryson

156. “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

157. “How do migrating birds know which one to follow? What if the lead bird just wants to be alone?”

— Bill Bryson

158. “Australia is mostly empty and a long way away. Its population is small and its role in the world consequently peripheral. It doesn’t have coups, recklessly overfish, arm disagreeable despots, grow coca in provocative quantities, or throw its weight around in a brash and unseemly manner. It is stable and peaceful and good. It doesn’t need watching, and so we don’t. But I will tell you this: the loss is entirely ours.”

— Bill Bryson

159. “I don’t want to go and start trying to make jokes in places like India, Tanzania or Iraq. Afghanistan is not a funny place.”

— Bill Bryson

160. “I still enjoy traveling a lot. I mean, it amazes me that I still get excited in hotel rooms just to see what kind of shampoo they’ve left me.”

— Bill Bryson

161. “In Russia there are no native words for efficiency, challenge, engagement ring, have fun, or take care.”

— Bill Bryson

162. “Of all the things I am not very good at, living in the real world is perhaps the most outstanding. I am constantly filled with wonder at the number of things that other people do without any evident difficulty that are pretty much beyond me.”

— Bill Bryson

163. “The way I see it, there are three reasons never to be unhappy. First, you were born. This in itself is a remarkable achievement.”

— Bill Bryson

164. “Cheapness is a great virtue.”

— Bill Bryson

165. “One day in 1987 Fallows was standing at a window in a London bank waiting to be served when a would-be robber named Douglas Bath stepped in front of him, brandished a handgun and demanded money from the cashier. Outraged, Fallows told Bath to ‘bugger off’ to the back of the line and wait his turn, to the presumed approving nods of others in the queue. Unprepared for this turn of events, Bath meekly departed from the bank empty-handed and was arrested a short distance away.”

— Bill Bryson

166. “If you can imagine a man having a vasectomy without anesthetic to the sound of frantic sitar-playing, you will have some idea of what popular Turkish music is like.”

— Bill Bryson

167. “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

168. “This bewildered but well-meaning gentleman opposed his daughter’s marriage to Captain Nungesser on the grounds – not unreasonable on the face of it – that Nungesser was destitute, broken-bodied, something of a bounder, unemployable except in time of war, and French.”

— Bill Bryson

169. “It seemed such an extraordinary notion – that I could set off from home and walk 1,800 miles through woods to Georgia, or turn the other way and clamber over the rough and stony White Mountains to the fabled prow of Mount Katahdin, floating in forest 450 miles to the north in a wilderness few have seen. A little voice in my head said: “Sounds neat! Let’s do it!”

— Bill Bryson

170. “Yet it has 58 uses as a noun, 126 as a verb, and 10 as a participial adjective. Its meanings are so various and scattered that it takes the OED 60,000 words – the length of a short novel – to discuss them all. A foreigner could be excused for thinking that to know set is to know English.”

— Bill Bryson

171. “I understand cricket – what’s going on, the scoring – but I can’t understand why.”

— Bill Bryson

172. “You can’t go to East Anglia and not visit Sutton Hoo. Well, you can, obviously, but you shouldn’t.”

— Bill Bryson

173. “I refer of course to the soaring wonder of the age known as the Eiffel Tower. Never in history has a structure been more technologically advanced, materially obsolescent, and gloriously pointless all at the same time.”

— Bill Bryson

174. “It’s not even possible to say quite where the outback is. To Australians anything vaguely rural is “the bush.” At some indeterminate point “the bush” becomes “the outback.” Push on for another two thousand miles or so and eventually you come to bush again, and then a city, and then the sea. And that’s Australia.”

— Bill Bryson

175. “Bayes’s theorem and that looks like this: People who understand Bayes’s theorem can use it to work out complex problems involving probability distributions – or inverse probabilities, as they are sometimes called.”

— Bill Bryson

176. “I love everything about motels. I can’t help myself. I still get excited every time I slip a key into a motel room door and fling it open.”

— Bill Bryson

177. “All that is really going in your mouth is texture and chemicals. It is your brain that reads these scentless, flavorless molecules and vivifies them for your pleasure. Your brownie is sheet music. It is your brain that makes it a symphony.”

— Bill Bryson

178. “Only twenty-six British universities have total endowments greater than the amount given annually to the Ohio State University football team. I.”

— Bill Bryson

179. “Only one thing is certain: we live on a knife edge. In.”

— Bill Bryson

180. “Every twenty minutes on the Appalachian Trail, Katz and I walked farther than the average American walks in a week. For 93 percent of all trips outside the home, for whatever distance or whatever purpose, Americans now get in a car. On average, the total walking of an American these days – that’s walking of all types: from car to office, from office to car, around the supermarket and shopping malls – adds up to 1.4 miles a week... That’s ridiculous.”

— Bill Bryson

181. “It is unthinkable to have a British countryside that doesn’t have actual functioning farmers riding tractors, cows in fields, things like that.”

— Bill Bryson

182. “The bad news is that atoms are fickle and their time of devotion is fleeting – fleeting indeed. Even a long human life adds up to only about 650,000 hours. And when that modest milestone flashes past, or at some other point thereabouts, for reasons unknown your atoms will shut you down, silently disassemble, and go off to be other things. And that’s it for you.”

— Bill Bryson

183. “Norfolk is full of medieval churches – it has 659 of them, more per square mile than anywhere else in the world.”

— Bill Bryson

184. “A significant fraction of thru-hikers reach Katahdin, then turn around and start back to Georgia. They just can’t stop walking, which kind of makes you wonder.”

— Bill Bryson

185. “Tune your television to any channel it doesn’t receive and about 1 percent of the dancing static you see is accounted for by this ancient remnant of the Big Bang. The next time you complain that there is nothing on, remember that you can always watch the birth of the universe.”

— Bill Bryson

186. “It is always quietly thrilling to find yourself looking at a world you know well but have never seen from such an angle before.”

— Bill Bryson

187. “Make no mistake. This is a planet of microbes. We are here at their pleasure. They don’t need us at all. We’d be dead in a day without them.”

— Bill Bryson

188. “One of the hardest ideas for humans to accept,’ he says, ’is that we are not the culmination of anything. There is nothing inevitable about our being here. It is part of our vanity as humans that we tend to think of evolution as a process that, in effect, was programmed to produce us.”

— Bill Bryson

189. “There are thousands of things that can kill us – slightly more than eight thousand, according to the International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems compiled by the World Health Organization – and we escape every one of them but one. For most of us, that’s not a bad deal.”

— Bill Bryson

190. “The universe is an amazingly fickle and eventful place, and our existence within is a wonder.”

— Bill Bryson

191. “Although Penzias and Wilson had not been looking for cosmic background radiation, didn’t know what it was when they had found it, and hadn’t described or interpreted its character in any paper, they received the 1978 Nobel Prize in physics. The Princeton researchers got only sympathy. According to Dennis Overbye in Lonely Hearts of the Cosmos, neither Penzias nor Wilson altogether understood the significance of what they had found until they read about it in the New York Times.”

— Bill Bryson

192. “It may not look it, but all the glass on Earth is flowing downwards under the relentless drag of gravity. Remove a pane of really old glass from the window of a European cathedral and it will be noticeably thicker at the bottom than at the top.”

— Bill Bryson

193. “Vitamin B proved to be not one vitamin but several, which is why we have B1, B2, and so on. To add to the confusion, Vitamin K has nothing to do with an alphabetical sequence. It was called K because its Danish discoverer, Henrik Dam, dubbed it “koagulations viatmin” for its role in blood clotting.”

— Bill Bryson

194. “Most big companies don’t like you very much, except hotels, airlines and Microsoft, which don’t like you at all.”

— Bill Bryson

195. “The history of any one part of the Earth, like the life of a soldier, consists of long periods of boredom and short periods of terror.”

— Bill Bryson

196. “My first rule of consumerism is never to buy anything you can’t make your children carry.”

— Bill Bryson

197. “What sets the carbon atom apart is that it is shamelessly promiscuous.”

— Bill Bryson

198. “America has given us a pretty decent modern world and doesn’t always get enough thanks for that. But for reasons that genuinely escape me, it has also become spectacularly accommodating to stupidity. Where.”

— Bill Bryson

199. “By all the laws of probability proteins shouldn’t exist.”

— Bill Bryson

200. “It is an intoxicating experience to taste Coca-Cola as if for the first time and to be conveyed to the very brink of orgasm by white bread. Makes all the discomfort worthwhile, if you ask me.”

— Bill Bryson