Top 500 Bill Bryson Quotes (2024 Update)
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301. “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

302. “The patients on Tuke Ward were a pleasant and tractable bunch and practised insanity with a certain elan.”

— Bill Bryson

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

— Bill Bryson

304. “Our instinct may be to see the impossibility of tracking everything down as frustrating, dispiriting, perhaps even appalling, but it can just as well be viewed as almost unbearably exciting. We live on a planet that has a more or less infinite capacity to surprise. What reasoning person could possibly want it any other way?”

— Bill Bryson

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

— Bill Bryson

306. “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

307. “I’m definitely an American, because I grew up here. But I’ve lived very happily in Britain.”

— Bill Bryson

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

— Bill Bryson

309. “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

310. “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

311. “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

312. “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

313. “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

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

— Bill Bryson

315. “A cough so robust that I tapped into two new seams of phlegm.”

— Bill Bryson

316. “In 1935, not far from where we stood now, some fishermen captured a fourteen-foot beige shark and took it to a public aquarium at Coogee, where it was put on display. The shark swam around for a day or two in its new home, then abruptly, and to the certain surprise of the viewing public, regurgitated a human arm.”

— Bill Bryson

317. “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

318. “For a long time it puzzled me how something so expensive, so leading edge, could be so useless, and then it occurred to me that a computer is a stupid machine with the ability to do incredibly smart things, while computer programmers are smart people with the ability to do incredibly stupid things. They are, in short, a perfect match.”

— Bill Bryson

319. “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

320. “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

321. “Des Moines is like your typical American city; it’s just these concentric circles of malls, built outward from the city.”

— Bill Bryson

322. “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

323. “According to Time Out magazine, at any given moment there are 600,000 people on the Underground, making it both a larger and more interesting place than Oslo.”

— Bill Bryson

324. “In Britain or Germany or America you might with great luck find a new strain of mountaintop lichen or some sprig of previously overlooked moss, but in Australia take a stroll through the bush and you can find half a dozen unnamed wildflowers, a grove of Jurassic angiosperms, and probably a ten-kilo lump of gold. I know where I’d be working if I were in science.”

— Bill Bryson

325. “Put in the crudest terms, Australia was slightly more important to us in 1997 than bananas, but not nearly as important as ice cream.”

— Bill Bryson

326. “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

327. “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

328. “Noting the lack of crime or security in the Netherlands, the author asked a native who guarded a national landmark. He got the replay, “We all do.”

— Bill Bryson

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

— Bill Bryson

330. “Nearly everyone I talked to had some gruesome story involving a guileless acquaintance who had gone off hiking the trail with high hopes and new boots and come stumbling back two days later with a bobcat attached to his head or dripping blood from an armless sleeve and whispering in a hoarse voice, “Bear!” before sinking into a troubled unconsciousness.”

— Bill Bryson

331. “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

332. “I can think of two very good reasons for not splitting an infinitive. 1. Because you feel that the rules of English ought to conform to the grammatical precepts of a language that died a thousand years ago. 2. Because you wish to cling to a pointless affectation of usage that is without the support of any recognized authority of the last 200 years, even at the cost of composing sentences that are ambiguous, inelegant, and patently contorted.”

— Bill Bryson

333. “Elizabethans were as free with their handwriting as they were with their spelling. Handbooks of handwriting suggested up to twenty different – often very different – ways of shaping particular letters.”

— Bill Bryson

334. “This is comfortable and clean and familiar. Apart from a tendency among men of a certain age to wear knee-high socks with shorts, these people are just like you and me.”

— Bill Bryson

335. “The youth of Idaho falls should be encouraged to take drugs in order to cope up with the fact that there is plutonium in their drinking water.”

— Bill Bryson

336. “Whatever prompted life to begin, it happened just once. That is the most extraordinary fact in biology, perhaps the most extraordinary fact we know.”

— Bill Bryson

337. “I think it’s only right that crazy people should have their own city, but I cannot for the life of me see why a sane person would want to go there.”

— Bill Bryson

338. “We live in a world that doesn’t altogether seem to want us here.”

— Bill Bryson

339. “When even camels can’t manage a desert, you know you’ve found a tough part of the world.”

— Bill Bryson

340. “Geologists are never at a loss for paperweights.”

— Bill Bryson

341. “They can tell us not only what Shakespeare wrote but what he read. Geoffrey Bullough devoted a lifetime, nearly, to tracking down all possible sources for virtually everything mentioned in Shakespeare, producing eight volumes of devoted exposition revealing not only what Shakespeare knew but precisely how he knew it.”

— Bill Bryson

342. “Stephen Hawking has observed with a touch of understandable excitement, that one cannot “predict future events exactly if one cannot even measure the present state of the universe precisely!”

— Bill Bryson

343. “The Pacific is about a foot and a half higher along its western edge – a consequence of the centrifugal force created by the Earth’s spin. Just as when you pull on a tub of water the water tends to flow toward the other end, as if reluctant to come with you, so the eastward spin of Earth piles water up against the ocean’s western margins.”

— Bill Bryson

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

— Bill Bryson

345. “All the things that are part of your heritage make you British – that makes this country what it is. It’s part of your history. And here, unlike America, it’s still living history.”

— Bill Bryson

346. “At a conference of sociologists in America in 1977, love was defined as “the cognitive-affective state characterized by intrusive and obsessive fantasizing concerning reciprocity of amorant feelings by the object of the amorance.” That is jargon – the practice of never calling a spade a spade when you might instead call it a manual earth-restructuring implement – and it is one of the great curses of modern English.”

— Bill Bryson

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

— Bill Bryson

348. “There’s something satisfying, I think,” Evans said, “about the idea of light travelling for millions of years through space and just at the right moment as it reaches Earth someone looks at the right bit of sky and sees it.”

— Bill Bryson

349. “It is a curious feature of our existance that we come from a planet that is very good at promoting life but even better at extinguishing it.”

— Bill Bryson

350. “In January of that year, according to a report written in America by a Times reporter, scientists were seriously investigating the possibility that a mysterious seismic disturbance in the remote Australian outback almost four years earlier had been a nuclear explosion set off by members of the Japanese doomsday cult Aum Shinrikyo.”

— Bill Bryson