Top 500 Bill Bryson Quotes (2026 Update)
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251. “The National Park Service actually has something of a tradition of making things extinct.”

— Bill Bryson

252. “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

253. “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

254. “Speakers from the Mediterranean region, for instance, like to put their faces very close, relatively speaking, to those they are addressing. A common scene when people from southern Europe and northern Europe are conversing, as at a cocktail party, is for the latter to spend the entire conversation stealthily retreating, to try to gain some space, and for the former to keep advancing to close the gap. Neither speaker may even be aware of it.”

— Bill Bryson

255. “Welcome. And congratulations. I am delighted that you could make it. Getting here wasn’t easy, I know. In fact, I suspect it was a little tougher than you realize.”

— Bill Bryson

256. “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

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

— Bill Bryson

258. “The one word that Newfoundland has given the world is penguin. No one has any idea what inspired it.”

— Bill Bryson

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

— Bill Bryson

260. “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

261. “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

262. “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

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

— Bill Bryson

264. “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

265. “Perforated eardrums were quite common16, too; but, as Haldane reassuringly noted in one of his essays, ’the drum generally heals up; and if a hole remains in it, although one is somewhat deaf, one can blow tobacco smoke out of the ear in question, which is a social accomplishment.”

— Bill Bryson

266. “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

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

— Bill Bryson

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

— Bill Bryson

269. “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

270. “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

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

— Bill Bryson

272. “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

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

— Bill Bryson

274. “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

275. “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

276. “As Edward P. Tryon of Columbia University once put it: “In answer to the question of why it happened, I offer the modest proposal that our Universe is simply one of those things which happen from time to time.”

— Bill Bryson

277. “Over a lifetime, we eat about sixty tons of food, which is equivalent, notes Carl Zimmer in Microcosm, to eating sixty small cars. In 1915, the average American spent half his weekly income on food. Today it’s just 6 percent. We live in a paradoxical situation. For centuries, people ate unhealthily out of economic necessity. Now we do it out of choice.”

— Bill Bryson

278. “I could be dead in a minute,” he said grimly, then clutched my forearm. “Look, if I get shot, do me a favor. Call my brother and tell him there’s $10,000 buried in a coffee can under his front lawn.” “You buried $10,000 under your brother’s front lawn?” “No, of course not, but he’s a little prick and it would serve him right. Let’s go.”

— Bill Bryson

279. “An increase of only a degree or so in body temperature has been shown to slow the replication rate of viruses by a factor of two hundred – an astonishing increase in self-defense from only a very modest rise in warmth.”

— Bill Bryson

280. “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

281. “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

282. “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

283. “I had always thought that once you grew up you could do anything you wanted – stay up all night or eat ice-cream straight out of the container.”

— Bill Bryson

284. “It sometimes occurs to me that the British have more heritage than is good for them. In a country where there is so astonishingly much of everything, it is easy to look on it as a kind of inexhaustible resource.”

— Bill Bryson

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

— Bill Bryson

286. “James Croll, the Scottish janitor and self-taught polymath whose theories concerning Earth’s orbit provided the first plausible explanation for how ice ages might have started.”

— Bill Bryson

287. “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

288. “Houses are really quite odd things. They have almost no universally defining qualities: they can be of practically any shape, incorporate virtually any material, be of almost any size. Yet wherever we go in the world we recognize domesticity the moment we see it.”

— Bill Bryson

289. “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

290. “The rooms were small and airless and cramped. To make matters worse, somebody in our group was making the most dreadful silent farts. Fortunately, it was me, so I wasn’t nearly as bothered as the others.”

— Bill Bryson

291. “The brain takes a long time to form completely. A teenager’s brain is only about 80 percent finished.”

— Bill Bryson

292. “From Ukraine, it wasn’t uncommon for hang gliders to take off near the border and float their way into Hungary or Romania. Once they hovered in the general vicinity of the drop spot, they’d release their cargo – hundreds, even thousands of cartons of cigarettes – make a hasty turn, and head back.”

— Bill Bryson

293. “On the way out my attention was caught by a machine making a lot of noise. A woman had just won $600. For ninety seconds the machine just poured out money, a waterfall of silver. When it stopped, the woman regarded the pile without pleasure and began feeding it back into the machine. I felt sorry for her. It was going to take her all night to get rid of that kind of money.”

— Bill Bryson

294. “Homo erectus was the first to hunt, the first to use fire, the first to fashion complex tools, the first to leave evidence of campsites, the first to look after the weak and frail.”

— Bill Bryson

295. “Sheepskin is a marvelously durable medium, though it has to be treated with some care. Whereas ink soaks into the fibers on paper, on sheepskin it stays on the surface, rather like chalk on a blackboard, and so can be rubbed away comparatively easily. “Sixteenth-century paper was of good quality, too,” he went on. “It was made of rags and was virtually acid free, so it has lasted very well.”

— Bill Bryson

296. “When I say “most people” I mean, of course, me after my first cocktail.”

— Bill Bryson

297. “As far as we can tell, we are the best there is. We may be all there is. It’s an unnerving thought that we may be the living universe’s supreme achievement and its worst nightmare simultaneously.”

— Bill Bryson

298. “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

299. “Everyone has a supremely low moment somewhere along the AT, usually when the urge to quit the trail becomes almost overpowering. The irony of my moment was that I wanted to get back on the trail and didn’t know how. I hadn’t lost just Katz, my boon companion, but my whole sense of connectedness to the trail. I had lost my momentum, my feeling of purpose. In the most literal way I needed to find my feet again.”

— Bill Bryson

300. “A world without newspapers or a world where the newspapers are purely electronic and you read them on a screen is not a very appealing world.”

— Bill Bryson