Top 500 Bill Bryson Quotes (2026 Update)
Page 8 of 10

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

— Bill Bryson

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

— Bill Bryson

353. “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

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

— Bill Bryson

355. “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

356. “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

357. “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

358. “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

359. “Medieval banquets show people eating all kinds of foods that are no longer eaten. Birds especially featured. Eagles, herons, peacocks, sparrows, larks, finches, swans, and almost all other feathered creatures were widely consumed. This wasn’t so much because swans and other birds were fantastically delicious – they weren’t; that’s why we don’t eat them now – but rather because other, better meats weren’t available.”

— Bill Bryson

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

— Bill Bryson

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

— Bill Bryson

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

— Bill Bryson

363. “Describing his experience with the sting of an extremely toxic jellyfish, he did something you don’t often see a scientist do: he shivered.”

— Bill Bryson

364. “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

365. “We were idiots really, but awfully happy, too.”

— Bill Bryson

366. “Science has been quite embattled. It’s the most important thing there is. An arts graduate is not going to fix global warming. They may do other valuable things, but they are not going to fix the planet or cure cancer or get rid of malaria.”

— Bill Bryson

367. “Each time you fly from North America to Australia, and without anyone asking how you feel about it, a day is taken away from you when you cross the international dateline.”

— Bill Bryson

368. “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

369. “Coming back to your native land after an absence of many years is a surprisingly unsettling business, a little like waking up from a long coma.”

— Bill Bryson

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

— Bill Bryson

371. “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

372. “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

373. “To be here now, alive in the twenty-first century and smart enough to know it, you also had to be the beneficiary of an extraordinary string of biological good fortune.”

— Bill Bryson

374. “Antioxidants are molecules that neutralize free radicals, so the thinking is that if you take a lot of them in the form of supplements, you can counter the effects of aging. Unfortunately, there is no scientific evidence to support that.”

— Bill Bryson

375. “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

376. “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

377. “For the first 99.99999 per cent of our history as organisms, we were in the same ancestral line as chimpanzees. Virtually nothing is known about the prehistory of chimpanzees, but whatever they were, we were. Then, about seven million years ago, something major happened. A group of new beings emerged from the tropical forests of Africa and began to move about on the open savanna. These.”

— Bill Bryson

378. “The day when people once again die from the scratch of a rose thorn may not be far away.”

— Bill Bryson

379. “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

380. “I just use my life story as a kind of device on which to hang comic observations. It’s not my interest or instinct to tell the world anything pertinent about myself or my family.”

— Bill Bryson

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

381. “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

382. “The one known cure for baldness is castration.”

— Bill Bryson

383. “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

384. “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

385. “In 2011, an interesting milestone in human history was passed. For the first time, more people globally died from non-communicable diseases like heart failure, stroke and diabetes than from all infectious diseases combined.1 We live in an age in which we are killed, more often than not, by lifestyle. We are in effect choosing how we shall die, albeit without much reflection or insight.”

— Bill Bryson

386. “As Siddhartha Mukherjee observed in The Gene: An Intimate History, humans don’t actually reproduce at all.8 Geckos reproduce; we recombine.”

— Bill Bryson

387. “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

388. “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

389. “Indeed, if you look around you on a bus or in a park or cafe or any crowded place, most of the people you see are very probably relatives. When someone boasts to you that he is descended from William the Conqueror or the Mayflower Pilgrims, you should answer at once: “Me, too!” In the most literal and fundamental sense we are all family.”

— Bill Bryson

390. “It occurred to me, not for the first time, that if Britain is ever to sort itself out, it is going to require a lot of euthanasia.”

— Bill Bryson

391. “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

Featured in: Country Quotes

392. “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

393. “I passed the time browsing in the windows of the many tourists shops that stand along it, reflecting on what a lot of things the Scots have given the world – kilts, bagpipes, tam-o’-shanters, tins of oatcakes, bright yellow sweaters with big diamond patterns, sacks of haggis – and how little anyone but a Scot would want them. Let.”

— Bill Bryson

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

— Bill Bryson

395. “I turned to my own bunk and examined it with a kind of appalled fascination. If the mattress stains were anything to go by, a previous user had not so much suffered from incontinence as rejoiced in it. He had evidently included the pillow in his celebrations.”

— Bill Bryson

396. “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

397. “Most scientists are without exception adorably quirky, and one of the ways of making it more accessible was to try to get readers interested in the person.”

— Bill Bryson

398. “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

399. “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

400. “Blenheim Palace, home of the Dukes of Marlborough, whose achievements over the last eleven generations could be inscribed with a Sharpie on the side of a peanut.”

— Bill Bryson