Top 500 Bill Bryson Quotes (2024 Update)
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351. “The day when people once again die from the scratch of a rose thorn may not be far away.”

— Bill Bryson

352. “The one word that Newfoundland has given the world is penguin. No one has any idea what inspired it.”

— Bill Bryson

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

— Bill Bryson

354. “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

355. “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

356. “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

357. “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

358. “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

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

— Bill Bryson

360. “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

361. “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

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

— Bill Bryson

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

— Bill Bryson

364. “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

365. “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

366. “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

367. “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

368. “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

369. “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

370. “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

371. “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

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

— Bill Bryson

373. “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

374. “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

375. “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

376. “Would Giovanni da Verrazano think being eaten by cannibals a reasonable price to pay for having his name attached to a toll bridge between Brooklyn and Staten Island? I suspect not.”

— Bill Bryson

377. “In ways that we have barely begun to understand, trillions upon trillions of reflexive chemical reactions add up to a mobile, thinking, decision-making you – or, come to that, a rather less reflective but still incredibly organized dung beetle. Every living thing, never forget, is a wonder of atomic engineering.”

— Bill Bryson

378. “Experimentation without mathematical explanation is blind; mathematical explanation without experimentation is empty.”

— Bill Bryson

379. “I always wanted to do a baseball book; I love baseball. The problem is that a very large part of my following is in non-baseball playing countries.”

— Bill Bryson

380. “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

381. “People in New York go to Calcutta to get some relief from begging.”

— Bill Bryson

382. “In the morning I awoke early and experienced that sinking sensation that overcomes you when you first open your eyes and realize that instead of a normal day ahead of you, with its scatterings of simple gratifications, you are going to have a day without even the tiniest of pleasures; you are going to drive across Ohio.”

— Bill Bryson

383. “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

384. “Pain is full of paradoxes. Its most self-evident characteristic is that it hurts–that’s what it is there for, after all–but sometimes pain feels slightly wonderful: when your muscles ache after a long run, say, or when you slide into a bath that is at once unbearably hot but also, somehow, deliciously not.”

— Bill Bryson

385. “When I asked her once why she didn’t walk to the gym and do five minutes less on the treadmill, she looked at me as if I were being willfully provocative. “Because I have a program for the treadmill,” she explained. “It records my distance and speed, and I can adjust it for degree of difficulty.” It hadn’t occurred to me how thoughtlessly deficient nature is in this regard.”

— Bill Bryson

386. “22 million tonnes of such unwanted fish are dumped back in the sea each year, mostly in the form of corpses.”

— Bill Bryson

387. “As Herman Melville put it: “We are not so much a nation as a world.”

— Bill Bryson

388. “It seems madness to think that a society would rate marginal economic growth above a livable earth, but there you are. I had always assumed the reason to build a bigger economy was to make the world a better place. In fact, it appears, the reason to build a bigger economy is, well, to build a bigger economy.”

— Bill Bryson

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

— Bill Bryson

390. “It was an odd situation. For a century and a half, men got rid of their own hair, which was perfectly comfortable, and instead covered their heads with something foreign and uncomfortable. Very often it was actually their own hair made into a wig. People who couldn’t afford wigs tried to make their hair look like a wig.”

— Bill Bryson

391. “Indeed, it has been suggested that there isn’t a single bit of any of us – not so much as a stray molecule8 – that was part of us nine years ago. It may not feel like it, but at the cellular level we are all youngsters.”

— Bill Bryson

392. “Dying is, to coin a phrase, the last thing your body wants to do.”

— Bill Bryson

393. “I suppose – I was on a long flight across the Pacific, staring idly out the window at moonlit ocean, when it occurred to me with a certain uncomfortable forcefulness that I didn’t know the first thing about the only planet I was ever going to live on.”

— Bill Bryson

394. “The upward flow of ancient heat to the Earth’s surface is measured in tens of milliwatts per square metre; the flow from the Sun above is measured in hundreds of watts per square metre.”

— Bill Bryson

395. “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

396. “In Iowa, we were not used to seeing the houses of well-known people on account of there were no well-known people in Iowa.”

— Bill Bryson

397. “Others did not fare so well. A German man in St. Louis who was believed to have spoken ill of his adopted country was set upon by a mob, dragged through the streets tied up in an American flag, and hanged. A jury subsequently found the mob leaders not guilty on the grounds that it had been a “patriotic murder.”

— Bill Bryson

398. “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

399. “When you tell an Iowan a joke, you can see a kind of race going on between his brain and his expression.”

— Bill Bryson

400. “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