Top 500 Bill Bryson Quotes (2026 Update)
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351. “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

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

— Bill Bryson

353. “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

354. “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

355. “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

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. “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

358. “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

359. “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

360. “You discard about a hundred billion red blood cells every day. They are a big component of what makes your stools brown.”

— Bill Bryson

361. “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

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

— Bill Bryson

363. “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

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

— Bill Bryson

365. “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

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

— Bill Bryson

367. “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

368. “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

369. “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

370. “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

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

— Bill Bryson

372. “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

373. “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

374. “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

375. “The sciences are sometimes likened to different levels of a tall building: logic in the basement, mathematics on the ground floor, then particle physics, then the rest of physics and chemistry, and so forth, all the way up to psychology, sociology – and the economists in the penthouse.”

— Bill Bryson

376. “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

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

— Bill Bryson

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

— Bill Bryson

379. “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

380. “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

381. “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

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

— Bill Bryson

383. “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

384. “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

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

— Bill Bryson

386. “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

387. “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

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

— Bill Bryson

389. “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

390. “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

391. “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

392. “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

393. “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

394. “Eighty percent of all that lives in Australia, plant and animal, exists nowhere else.”

— Bill Bryson

395. “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

396. “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

397. “I love the way the Italians park. You turn any street corner in Rome and it looks as if you’ve just missed a parking competition for blind people.”

— Bill Bryson

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

— Bill Bryson

399. “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

400. “Chicago was to corruption what Pittsburgh was to steel or Hollywood to motion pictures. It refined and cultivated it, and embraced it without embarrassment.”

— Bill Bryson