Top 500 Bill Bryson Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 6 of 10

251. “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

252. “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

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

— Bill Bryson

254. “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

255. “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

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

— Bill Bryson

257. “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

258. “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

259. “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

260. “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

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

— Bill Bryson

262. “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

263. “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

264. “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

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

— Bill Bryson

266. “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

267. “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

268. “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

269. “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

270. “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

271. “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

272. “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

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

— Bill Bryson

274. “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

275. “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

276. “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

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

— Bill Bryson

278. “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

279. “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

280. “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

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

— Bill Bryson

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

— Bill Bryson

283. “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

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

— Bill Bryson

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

— Bill Bryson

286. “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

287. “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

288. “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

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

— Bill Bryson

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

— Bill Bryson

291. “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

292. “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

293. “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

294. “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

295. “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

296. “When you write books for a living, you come to realize that while not all people who write to authors are strange, all people who are strange write to authors.”

— Bill Bryson

297. “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

298. “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

299. “Iowa, to be on the safe side, outlawed conversations in any language other than English in schools, at church, or even over the telephone. When people protested that they would have to give up church services in their own languages, Governor William L. Harding responded: “There is no use in anyone wasting his time praying in other languages than English. God is listening only to the English tongue.”

— Bill Bryson

300. “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