Top 500 Bill Bryson Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “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

202. “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

203. “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

204. “All 2,100 miles of the trail, as well as side trails, footbridges, signs, blazes, and shelters, are maintained by volunteers – indeed, the AT is said to be the largest volunteer-run undertaking on the planet.”

— Bill Bryson

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

— Bill Bryson

206. “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

207. “Once in a great while, a few times in history, a human mind produces an observation so acute and unexpected that people can’t quite decide which is the more amazing – the fact or the thinking of it.”

— Bill Bryson

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

— Bill Bryson

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

— Bill Bryson

210. “I would rather have bowel surgery in the woods with a stick. If you are not stung or pronged to death in some unexpected manner, you may be fatally chomped by sharks or crocodiles, or carried helplessly out to sea by irresistible currents, or left to stagger to an unhappy death in the baking outback.”

— Bill Bryson

211. “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

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

— Bill Bryson

213. “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, barely 350 yards a day. That’s ridiculous.”

— Bill Bryson

214. “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

215. “Beauty is only skin deep, but ugly goes clean to the bone. – DOROTHY PARKER.”

— Bill Bryson

216. “H. L. Mencken called it “the one authentic rectum of civilization,” but for most people Hollywood was a place of magic.”

— Bill Bryson

217. “Every second a hundred bolts of lightning streak to Earth across the globe as the electric charges that build up within storm clouds are attracted by the positively charged ground. Earth experiences about 40,000 thunderstorms a day.”

— Bill Bryson

218. “That is the most extraordinary fact about Britain. It wants to be a garden. Flowers bloom in the unlikeliest places – on railway sidings and waste grounds where there is nothing beneath them but rubble and grit.”

— Bill Bryson

219. “The hardest part was coming to terms with the constant dispiriting discovery that there is always more hill.”

— Bill Bryson

220. “Travel is like love, mostly because it’s a heightened state of awareness, in which we are mindful, receptive, undimmed by familiarity and ready to be transformed. That is why the best trips, like the best love affairs, never really end.” All love affairs, all long-term relationships – travel included – demand that we keep an element of mystery alive and kicking.”

— Bill Bryson

221. “The English invented cricket to make other human endeavors look interesting.”

— Bill Bryson

222. “It is natural but wrong to visualize the singularity as a kind of pregnant dot hanging in a dark, boundless void. But there is no space, no darkness. The singularity has no “around” around it. There is no space for it to occupy, no place for it to be. We can’t even ask how long it has been there – whether it has just lately popped into being, like a good idea, or whether it has been there forever, quietly awaiting the right moment. Time doesn’t exist. There is no past for it to emerge from.”

— Bill Bryson

223. “At a conference of sociologists in America in 1977, love was defined as “the cognitive-affective state characterized by intrusive and obsessive fantasizing concerning reciprocity of amorant feelings by the object of the amorance.”

— Bill Bryson

224. “Karl Schimper, was actually the first to coin the term “ice age.”

— Bill Bryson

225. “He had the sort of face that makes you realize God does have a sense of humor.”

— Bill Bryson

226. “If a potato can produce vitamin C, why can’t we? Within the animal kingdom only humans and guinea pigs are unable to synthesize vitamin C in their own bodies. Why us and guinea pigs? No point asking. Nobody knows.”

— Bill Bryson

227. “Even though sugar was very expensive, people consumed it till their teeth turned black, and if their teeth didn’t turn black naturally, they blackened them artificially to show how wealthy and marvelously self-indulgent they were.”

— Bill Bryson

228. “Boston’s freeway system is insane. It was clearly designed by a person who had spent his childhood crashing toy trains.”

— Bill Bryson

229. “I love to watch cities wake up, and Paris wakes up more abruptly, more startlingly, than any place I know.”

— Bill Bryson

230. “Sometimes these differences in meaning take on a kind of bewildering circularity. A tramp in Britain is a bum in America, while a bum in Britain is a fanny in America, while a fanny in Britain is – well, we’ve covered that. To a foreigner it must seem sometimes as if we are being intentionally contrary.”

— Bill Bryson

231. “Calais is an interesting place that exists solely for the purpose of giving English people in shell suits somewhere to go for the day.”

— Bill Bryson

232. “In fact, mostly what the Forest Service does is build roads.”

— Bill Bryson

233. “For most of its history until fairly recent times the general pattern for Earth was to be hot with no permanent ice anywhere. The current ice age – ice epoch really – started about forty million years ago, and has ranged from murderously bad to not bad at all.”

— Bill Bryson

234. “Impulsively, I lumbered aboard, bought a ticket, and took a seat toward the back. The trick of successful walking, I always say, is knowing when to stop.”

— Bill Bryson

235. “I’m not a natural story-teller. Put a keyboard in front of me and I’m fine, but stand me up in front of an audience and I’m actually quite shy and reserved.”

— Bill Bryson

236. “Among the tiny atomic structures the plankton take to the grave with them are two very stable isotopes – oxygen-16 and oxygen-18.”

— Bill Bryson

237. “It’s a slightly humbling thought that the genes you carry are immensely ancient and possibly – so far anyway – eternal. You will die and fade away, but your genes will go on and on so long as you and your descendants continue to produce offspring.”

— Bill Bryson

238. “A hundred years after his death, a statue of Lavoisier was erected in Paris and much admired until someone pointed out that it looked nothing like him. Under questioning the sculptor admitted that he had used the head of the mathematician and philosopher the Marquis de Condorcet – apparently he had a spare – in the hope that no one would notice or, having noticed, would care.”

— Bill Bryson

239. “For a long time, I’d been vaguely fascinated by the idea that Charles Lindbergh flew the Atlantic and Babe Ruth hit 60 home runs in the same summer.”

— Bill Bryson

240. “For us, the universe goes only as far as light has travelled in the billions of years since the universe was formed.”

— Bill Bryson

241. “It was full of lazy late-afternoon shadows and an impossible green lushness such as could only be appreciated by someone freshly arrived.”

— Bill Bryson

242. “Why is it, I wondered, that old people are always so self-centered and excitable? But I just smiled benignly and stood back, comforted by the thought that soon they would be dead.”

— Bill Bryson

243. “The thing about Ayers Rock is that by the time you finally get there you are already a little sick of it.”

— Bill Bryson

244. “Strange as it may seem, wrote Richard Feynman, we understand the distribution of matter in the interior of the Sun far better than we understand the interior of the Earth.”

— Bill Bryson

245. “Each mobile phone today – indeed, each washing machine – has more computing power than NASA could deploy on the Apollo programme.”

— Bill Bryson

246. “The one thing we have in common with all other living things is that for nearly four billion years our ancestors have managed to slip through a series of closing doors every time we needed them to. Stephen Jay Gould expressed it succinctly in a well-known line: “Humans are here today because our particular line never fractured – never once at any of the billion points that could have erased us from history.”

— Bill Bryson

247. “Finally, this being America, there is the constant possibility of murder.”

— Bill Bryson

248. “Still, I never really mind bad service in a restaurant. It makes me feel better about not leaving a tip.”

— Bill Bryson

249. “When I awoke it was daylight. The inside of my tent was coated in a curious flaky rime, which I realized after a moment was all of my nighttime snores, condensed and frozen and pasted to the fabric, as if into a scrapbook of respiratory memories.”

— Bill Bryson

250. “If you want to say that a word has a circumflex on its penultimate syllable, without saying flat out that it has a circumflex there, there is a word for it: properispomenon.”

— Bill Bryson