Top 500 Bill Bryson Quotes (2024 Update)
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351. “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

352. “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

353. “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

354. “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

355. “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

356. “Vermont is Volvos and antique shops and country inns with cutely contrived names like Quail Hollow Lodge and Fiddlehead Farm Inn. New Hampshire is guys in hunting caps and pickup trucks with license plates bearing the feisty slogan “Live Free or Die.”

— Bill Bryson

357. “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

358. “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

359. “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

360. “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

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

— Bill Bryson

362. “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

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

— Bill Bryson

364. “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

365. “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

366. “22 million tonnes of such unwanted fish are dumped back in the sea each year, mostly in the form of corpses.”

— Bill Bryson

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

— Bill Bryson

368. “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

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

— Bill Bryson

370. “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

371. “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

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

— Bill Bryson

373. “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

374. “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

375. “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

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

— Bill Bryson

377. “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

378. “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

379. “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

380. “Perhaps it would be an idea to require developers to live on their own estates for five years, as a demonstration of their superb liveability. It’s just a thought. I.”

— Bill Bryson

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

— Bill Bryson

382. “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

383. “Hutton noticed that if he used a pencil to connect points of equal height, it all became much more orderly. Indeed, one could instantly get a sense of the overall shape and slope of the mountain. He had invented contour lines.”

— Bill Bryson

384. “Nobody deserves to go to the World Series more than the Chicago Cubs. But they can’t go because that would spoil their custom of never going. It is an irreconcilable paradox.”

— Bill Bryson

385. “Have you ever seen Glenn Beck in operation? It is the most terrifying thing. It’s so bad that you think he’s going to announce in a minute that it’s all a great con. He makes Sarah Palin look reasonable and steady.”

— Bill Bryson

386. “In a similar study at the University of Arizona, researchers infected the metal door handle to an office building and found it took only about four hours for the “virus” to spread through the entire building, infecting over half of employees and turning up on virtually every shared device like photocopiers and coffee machines. In the real world, such infestations can stay active for up to three days.”

— Bill Bryson

387. “Somehow, from this Gilbert concluded that the Moon’s craters were indeed formed by impacts – in itself quite a radical notion for the time – but.”

— Bill Bryson

388. “When simple plants colonized the land and the first creatures crawled gasping from the sea, the Appalachians were there to greet them.”

— Bill Bryson

389. “Four times I was honked at for having the temerity to proceed through town without the benefit of metal.”

— Bill Bryson

390. “America is a very seductive place in terms of lifestyle and comfort, but it wasn’t for me.”

— Bill Bryson

391. “She was torn between her customer service training and her youthful certitude.”

— Bill Bryson

392. “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

393. “It is perhaps little wonder that the end of Victorianism almost exactly coincided with the invention of psychoanalysis.”

— Bill Bryson

394. “One of the hardest ideas for humans to accept,” he says, “is that we are not the culmination of anything.”

— Bill Bryson

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

— Bill Bryson

396. “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

397. “I often use alcohol as an artificial check on my skills.”

— Bill Bryson

398. “History, Jared Diamond notes, is full of diseases that ‘once caused terrifying epidemics and then disappeared as mysteriously as they had come38’. He cites the robust but mercifully transient English sweating sickness, which raged from 1485 to 1552, killing tens of thousands as it went, before burning itself out. Too much efficiency is not a good thing for any infectious organism.”

— Bill Bryson

399. “In just 200 million years, possibly less, the Earth was essentially formed, though still molten and subject to constant bombardment from all the debris that remained floating about. At.”

— Bill Bryson

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

— Bill Bryson