Top 500 Bill Bryson Quotes (2026 Update)
Page 6 of 10

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

— Bill Bryson

252. “In three minutes, 98 percent of all the matter there is or will ever be has been produced. We have a universe.”

— Bill Bryson

253. “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

254. “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

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

— Bill Bryson

256. “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

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

— Bill Bryson

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

— Bill Bryson

259. “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

260. “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

261. “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

262. “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

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

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

— Bill Bryson

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

— Bill Bryson

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

— Bill Bryson

266. “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

267. “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

268. “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

269. “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

270. “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

271. “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

272. “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

273. “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

274. “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

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. “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

277. “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

278. “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

279. “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

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

— Bill Bryson

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

— Bill Bryson

282. “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

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

— Bill Bryson

284. “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

285. “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

286. “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

287. “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

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

— Bill Bryson

289. “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

290. “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

291. “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

292. “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

293. “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

294. “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

295. “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

296. “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

297. “Whatever else it may be, at the level of chemistry life is curiously mundane: carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen, a little calcium, a dash of sulfur, a light dusting of other very ordinary elements – nothing you wouldn’t find in any ordinary drugstore – and that’s all you need. The only thing special about the atoms that make you is that they make you. That is of course the miracle of life.”

— Bill Bryson

298. “If we were randomly inserted into the universe,” Sagan wrote, “the chances that you would be on or near a planet would be less than one in a billion trillion trillion.”

— Bill Bryson

299. “I am quite certain that if the rest of the world vanished overnight and the development of cricket was left in Australian hands, within a generation the players would be wearing shorts and using the bats to hit each other.”

— Bill Bryson

300. “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