Top 500 Bill Bryson Quotes (2024 Update)
Page 5 of 10

201. “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

202. “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

203. “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

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

— Bill Bryson

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

— Bill Bryson

206. “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

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

— Bill Bryson

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

— Bill Bryson

209. “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

210. “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

211. “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

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

— Bill Bryson

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

— Bill Bryson

214. “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

215. “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

216. “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

217. “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

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

— Bill Bryson

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

— Bill Bryson

220. “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

221. “The National Park Service actually has something of a tradition of making things extinct.”

— Bill Bryson

222. “Glance at the night sky and what you see is history and lots of it – not the stars as they are now but as they were when their light left them.”

— Bill Bryson

223. “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

224. “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

225. “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

226. “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

227. “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

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

— Bill Bryson

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

— Bill Bryson

230. “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

231. “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

232. “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

233. “Every atom you possess has almost certainly passed through several stars and been part of millions of organisms on its way to becoming you.”

— Bill Bryson

234. “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

235. “On the dashboard of our family car is a shallow indentation about the size of a paperback book. If you are looking for somewhere to put your sunglasses or spare change, it is the obvious place, and it works extremely well, I must say, so long as the car is not actually moving. However, as soon as you put the car in motion... everything slides off... It can hold nothing that has not been nailed to it. So I ask you: what then is it for?”

— Bill Bryson

236. “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

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

— Bill Bryson

238. “I ended up with enough equipment to bring full employment to a vale of sherpas –.”

— Bill Bryson

239. “As a rule of thumb, I would submit that if you need to call your floss provider, for any reason, you are probably not ready for this level of oral hygiene.”

— Bill Bryson

240. “Just being kind, for instance. A study in New Zealand of diabetic patients in 2016 found that the proportion suffering severe complications was 40 per cent lower among patients treated by doctors rated high for compassion. As one observer put it, that is ‘comparable to the benefits seen with the most intensive medical therapy for diabetes’.”

— Bill Bryson

241. “It sometimes occurs to me that the British have more heritage than isgood for them.”

— Bill Bryson

242. “I like being in a country where when cows attack, word of it gets around. That’s what I mean when I say Britain is cozy.”

— Bill Bryson

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

— Bill Bryson

244. “In its first three minutes, according to inflation theory, the universe ran away with itself, doubling in size every one million million million million millionths of a second. Ninety-eight per cent of all that exists was created in those first 180 seconds.”

— Bill Bryson

245. “Sumptuary laws, as they were known, laid down precisely, if preposterously, who could wear what.”

— Bill Bryson

246. “My first rule of travel is never to go to a place that sounds like a medical condition and Critz is clearly an incurable disease involving flaking skin.”

— Bill Bryson

247. “Human beings would split the atom and invent television, nylon, and instant coffee before they could figure out the age of their own planet.”

— Bill Bryson

248. “Proteins can’t exist without DNA and DNA has no purpose without proteins. Are we to assume, then, that they arose simultaneously with the purpose of supporting each other? If so: wow. And.”

— Bill Bryson

249. “Roads get wider and busier and less friendly to pedestrians. And all of the development based around cars, like big sprawling shopping malls. Everything seems to be designed for the benefit of the automobile and not the benefit of the human being.”

— Bill Bryson

250. “Ah,” he said in a tone of genial wisdom, “a chancellor is rather like a bidet. Everyone is pleased to have one, but no one knows quite what they are for.” A chancellor is nominally the head of a university, but in practice has no role, no power, no purpose.”

— Bill Bryson