Top 500 Bill Bryson Quotes (2024 Update)
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251. “For us, the universe goes only as far as light has travelled in the billions of years since the universe was formed.”

— Bill Bryson

252. “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

253. “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

254. “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

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

— Bill Bryson

256. “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

257. “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

258. “The one thing we have in common with all other living things is that for nearly four billion years our ancestors have managed to slip through a series of closing doors every time we needed them to. Stephen Jay Gould expressed it succinctly in a well-known line: “Humans are here today because our particular line never fractured – never once at any of the billion points that could have erased us from history.”

— Bill Bryson

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

— Bill Bryson

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

— Bill Bryson

261. “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

262. “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

263. “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

264. “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

265. “A hundred years after his death, a statue of Lavoisier was erected in Paris and much admired until someone pointed out that it looked nothing like him. Under questioning the sculptor admitted that he had used the head of the mathematician and philosopher the Marquis de Condorcet – apparently he had a spare – in the hope that no one would notice or, having noticed, would care.”

— Bill Bryson

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

— Bill Bryson

267. “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

268. “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

269. “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

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

— Bill Bryson

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

— Bill Bryson

272. “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

273. “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

274. “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

275. “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

276. “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

277. “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

278. “It was full of lazy late-afternoon shadows and an impossible green lushness such as could only be appreciated by someone freshly arrived.”

— Bill Bryson

279. “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

280. “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

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

— Bill Bryson

282. “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

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

— Bill Bryson

284. “Facts are surprisingly delible things, and in four hundred years a lot of them simply fade away. One of the most popular plays of the age was Arden of Faversham, but no one now knows who wrote it. When an author’s identity is known, that knowledge is often marvelously fortuitous.”

— Bill Bryson

285. “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

286. “A straightforward way of defining metaphysics is as the set of assumptions and practices present in the scientist’s mind before he or she begins to do science. There is nothing wrong.”

— Bill Bryson

287. “If we should be worrying about anything to do with the future of English, it should not be that the various strands will drift apart but that they will grow indistinguishable. And what a sad, sad loss that would be.”

— Bill Bryson

288. “Suddenly we were in Hawaii – tropical mountains running down to sparkling seas, sweeping bays, flawless beaches guarded by listing palms, little green and rocky islands standing off the headlands. From time to time we drove through sunny canefields, overlooked by the steep, blue eminence of the Great Dividing Range.”

— Bill Bryson

289. “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

290. “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

291. “I have long known that it is part of God’s plan for me to spend a little time with each of the most stupid people on earth, and Mary Ellen was proof that even in the Appalachian woods I would not be spared. It became evident that she was a rarity.”

— Bill Bryson

292. “Houses aren’t refuges from history. They are where history ends up.”

— Bill Bryson

293. “Is it raining out?’ the reception girl asked brightly as I filled in the registration card between sneezes and pauses to wipe water from my face with the back of my arm. ‘No, my ship sank and I had to swim the last seven miles.”

— Bill Bryson

294. “Worse still, it isn’t actually necessary to look to space for petrifying danger. As we are about to see, Earth can provide plenty of danger of its own.”

— Bill Bryson

295. “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

296. “Moreover, wool wasn’t sheared in the early days, but painfully plucked. It is little wonder that sheep are such skittish animals when humans are around.”

— Bill Bryson

297. “If a product or enterprise doesn’t constantly reinvent itself, it is superseded, cast aside, abandoned without sentiment in favor of something bigger, newer, and, alas, nearly always uglier.”

— Bill Bryson

298. “Nothing gives the English more pleasure, in a quiet but determined sort of way, than to do things oddly.”

— Bill Bryson

299. “And before long there will be no more milk in bottles delivered to the doorstep or sleepy rural pubs, and the countryside will be mostly shopping centers and theme parks. Forgive me. I don’t mean to get upset. But you are taking my world away from me, piece by little piece, and sometimes it just pisses me off. Sorry.”

— Bill Bryson

300. “Life, in short, just wants to be.”

— Bill Bryson