Top 500 Bill Bryson Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “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

152. “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

153. “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

154. “Where I grew up, in Des Moines, Iowa, there is hardly any downtown economic activity now. Everybody shops in malls – you don’t find a sense of community in malls.”

— Bill Bryson

155. “Britain still has the most reliably beautiful countryside of anywhere in the world. I would hate to be part of the generation that allowed that to be lost.”

— Bill Bryson

156. “In a funny way, nothing makes you feel more like a native of your own country than to live where nearly everyone is not.”

— Bill Bryson

157. “Most of the time I am sunk in thought, but at some point on each walk there comes a moment when I look up and notice, with a kind of first-time astonishment, the amazing complex delicacy of the words, the casual ease with which elemental things come together to form a composition that is – whatever the season, wherever I put my besotted gaze – perfect.”

— Bill Bryson

158. “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

159. “It is mildly disconcerting to reflect that the whole of meaningful human history – the development of farming, the creation of towns, the rise of mathematics and writing and science and all the rest – has taken place within an atypical patch of fair weather.”

— Bill Bryson

160. “Eating in Sweden is really just a series of heartbreaks.”

— Bill Bryson

161. “It is a natural human impulse to think of evolution as a long chain of improvements, of a never-ending advance towards largeness and complexity – in a word, towards us. We flatter ourselves. Most of the real diversity in evolution has been small-scale. We large things are just flukes – an interesting side branch.”

— Bill Bryson

162. “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

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

— Bill Bryson

164. “Life on Earth, you see, is not only brief but dismayingly tenuous.”

— Bill Bryson

165. “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

166. “You can be a scientist and believe in god: the two can go hand in hand.”

— Bill Bryson

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

— Bill Bryson

168. “England was full of words I’d never heard before – streaky bacon, short back and sides, Belisha beacon, serviettes, high tea, ice-cream cornet.”

— Bill Bryson

169. “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

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

— Bill Bryson

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

— Bill Bryson

172. “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

173. “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

174. “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

175. “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

176. “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

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

— Bill Bryson

178. “Cheapness is a great virtue.”

— Bill Bryson

179. “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

180. “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

181. “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

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

— Bill Bryson

183. “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

184. “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

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. “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

187. “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

188. “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

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

— Bill Bryson

190. “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

191. “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

192. “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

193. “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

194. “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

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

— Bill Bryson

196. “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

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

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

— Bill Bryson

200. “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