Top 500 Bill Bryson Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “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

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

— Bill Bryson

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

— Bill Bryson

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

— Bill Bryson

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

— Bill Bryson

256. “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

257. “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

258. “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

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

— Bill Bryson

260. “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

261. “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

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

— Bill Bryson

263. “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

264. “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

265. “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

266. “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

267. “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

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

— Bill Bryson

269. “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

270. “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

271. “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

272. “Kazakhstan, it turns out, was once attached to Norway and New England.”

— Bill Bryson

273. “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

274. “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

275. “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

276. “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

277. “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

278. “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

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

— Bill Bryson

280. “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

281. “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

282. “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

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. “An Australian fly will try to suck the moisture off your eyeball. He will, if not constantly turned back, go into parts of your ears that a Q-tip can only dream about. He will happily die for the glory of taking a tiny dump on your tongue. Get thirty or forty of them dancing around you in the same way and madness will shortly follow. And.”

— Bill Bryson

286. “It is an interesting experience to become acquainted with a country through the eyes of the insane, and, if I may say so, a particularly useful grounding for life in Britain.”

— Bill Bryson

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

— Bill Bryson

288. “Would Giovanni da Verrazano think being eaten by cannibals a reasonable price to pay for having his name attached to a toll bridge between Brooklyn and Staten Island? I suspect not.”

— Bill Bryson

289. “London isn’t a place at all. It’s a million little places.”

— Bill Bryson

290. “Alexander von Humboldt, yet another friend, may have had Agassiz at least partly in mind when he observed that there are three stages in scientific discovery7: first, people deny that it is true; then they deny that it is important; finally they credit the wrong person.”

— Bill Bryson

291. “When Daniel Boone is uneasy, you know it’s time to watch your step.”

— Bill Bryson

292. “Every day, it has been estimated, between one and five of your cells turn cancerous, and your immune system captures and kills them.”

— Bill Bryson

293. “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

294. “One idea to a sentence is still the best advice that anyone has ever given on writing.”

— Bill Bryson

295. “Rome was as wonderful as I had hoped it would be, certainly a step up from Peoria.”

— Bill Bryson

296. “And I find chopsticks frankly distressing. Am I alone in thinking it odd that a people ingenious enough to invent paper, gunpowder, kites and any number of other useful objects, and who have a noble history extending back 3,000 years haven’t yet worked out that a pair of knitting needles is no way to capture food?”

— Bill Bryson

297. “Our word “salary” comes literally from the vulgar Latin salarium, “salt money” – the Roman soldier’s ironic term for what it would buy.”

— Bill Bryson

298. “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

299. “Look at a globe and what you are seeing really is a snapshot of the continents as they have been for just one-tenth of 1 per cent of the earths history.”

— Bill Bryson

300. “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