Top 500 Bill Bryson Quotes (2026 Update)
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301. “We have body clocks not just in the brain but all over – in our pancreas, liver, heart, kidneys, fatty tissue, muscle, virtually everywhere – and these operate to their own timetables, dictating when hormones are released or organs are busiest or most relaxed. Your reflexes, for instance, are at their sharpest in mid-afternoon, while blood pressure peaks toward evening. Men tend to pump more testosterone early in the morning than later in the day.”

— Bill Bryson

302. “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

303. “Second, you are alive. For the tiniest moment in the span of eternity you have the miraculous privilege to exist.”

— Bill Bryson

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

— Bill Bryson

305. “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

306. “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

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

— Bill Bryson

308. “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

309. “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

310. “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

311. “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

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

— Bill Bryson

313. “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

314. “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

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

— Bill Bryson

316. “All Indo-European languages have the capacity to form compounds. Indeed, German and Dutch do it, one might say, to excess. But English does it more neatly than most other languages, eschewing the choking word chains that bedevil other Germanic languages and employing the nifty refinement of making the elements reversible, so that we can distinguish between a houseboat and a boathouse, between basketwork and a workbasket, between a casebook and a bookcase. Other languages lack this facility.”

— Bill Bryson

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

— Bill Bryson

318. “Baron Rothschild, whose obsessive quest for rare species led to the annihilation of several.”

— Bill Bryson

319. “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

320. “But I got a great deal else from the experience. I learned to pitch a tent and sleep beneath the stars. For a brief, proud period I was slender and fit. I gained a profound respect for the wilderness and nature and the benign dark power of woods. I understand now, in a way I never did before, the colossal scale of the world. I found patience and fortitude that I didn’t know I had. I discovered an America that millions of people scarcely know exists. I made a friend. I came home.”

— Bill Bryson

321. “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

322. “It would be just my luck, of course, to be savaged by an animal with a flea collar and a medical history. I imagined lying on my back, being extravagantly ravaged, inclining my head slightly to read a dangling silver tag that said: “My name is Mr. Bojangles. If found please call Tanya and Vinny at 924-4667.”

— Bill Bryson

323. “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

324. “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

325. “As my father always used to tell me, ‘You see, son, there’s always someone in the world worse off than you.’ And I always used to think, ‘So?”

— Bill Bryson

326. “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

327. “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

328. “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

329. “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

330. “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

331. “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

332. “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

333. “Almost three-quarters of the forty million antibiotic prescriptions written each year in the United States are for conditions that cannot be cured with antibiotics.”

— Bill Bryson

334. “A physicist is the atoms’ way of thinking about atoms. – Anonymous.”

— Bill Bryson

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

— Bill Bryson

336. “As humans we are inclined to feel that life must have a point. We have plans and aspirations and desires. We want to take constant advantage of all the intoxicating existence we’ve been endowed with. But what’s life to a cell? Yet it’s impulse to exist, to be, is every bit as strong as ours – perhaps even stronger. Life just wants to be.”

— Bill Bryson

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

— Bill Bryson

338. “The biggest component in any human, filling 61 percent of available space, is oxygen. It may seem a touch counterintuitive that we are almost two-thirds composed of an odorless gas.”

— Bill Bryson

339. “The greatest possible irony would be if in our endless quest to fill our lives with comfort and happiness we created a world that had neither.”

— Bill Bryson

340. “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

341. “His colleague Richard Feynman wanted to call these new basic particles partons16, as in Dolly, but was over-ruled. Instead they became known as quarks.”

— Bill Bryson

342. “I am so well prepared financially that I have money in a range of currencies that no longer exist. I.”

— Bill Bryson

343. “For five of fifteen smells tested, humans actually outperformed dogs.”

— Bill Bryson

344. “Every kid I knew had a father with a little stash of men’s magazines which the father thought was secret and which the kid knew all about.”

— Bill Bryson

345. “Life in Australia would go on, and I would hear nothing, because once you leave Australia, Australia ceases to be.”

— Bill Bryson

346. “Walpole invented a term, gloomth, to convey the ambience of Gothick; Wyatt’s houses were the very quintessence of gloomth.”

— Bill Bryson

347. “And yet in Britain, despite the constant buffetings of history, English survived. It is a cherishable irony that a language that succeeded almost by stealth, treated for centuries as the inadequate and second-rate tongue of peasants, should one day become the most important and successful language in the world.”

— Bill Bryson

348. “You may find that your parents are the most delightful people, but you don’t want to live with them.”

— Bill Bryson

349. “Illiteracy was the usual condition in sixteenth-century England, to be sure. According to one estimate at least 70 percent of men and 90 percent of women of the period couldn’t even sign their names. But as one moved up the social scale, literacy rates rose appreciably.”

— Bill Bryson

350. “Don’t ever do anything on principle alone. If you haven’t got a better reason for doing something other than the principle of the thing, then don’t do it.”

— Bill Bryson