Top 500 Bill Bryson Quotes (2026 Update)
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401. “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

402. “When they aren’t being incompetent, city officials like to relax with a little corruption.”

— Bill Bryson

403. “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

404. “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

405. “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

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

— Bill Bryson

407. “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

408. “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

409. “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

410. “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

411. “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

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

— Bill Bryson

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

— Bill Bryson

414. “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

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

— Bill Bryson

416. “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

417. “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

418. “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

419. “We are so used to the notion of our own inevitability as life’s dominant species that it is hard to grasp that we are here only because of timely extraterrestrial bangs and other random flukes. The one thing we have in common with all other living things is that for nearly four billions years our ancestors have managed to slip through a series of closing doors every time we needed them to.”

— Bill Bryson

420. “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

421. “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

Featured in: Country Quotes

422. “Nearly every aspect of life was subject to some measure of legal restraint. At a local level, you could be fined for letting your ducks wander in the road, for misappropriating town gravel, for having a guest in your house without a permit from the local bailiff.”

— Bill Bryson

423. “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

424. “Fired by the oxygen of irrationality, America entered a period of grave intolerance, not just toward immigrants but toward any kind of antiestablishment behavior. The Sedition Act of 1918 made it illegal, among much else, to make critical remarks about government expenditure or even the YMCA.44 So low did standards of civil liberty fall that police routinely arrested not only almost anyone remotely suspected of sedition, but even those who came to visit them in jail.”

— Bill Bryson

425. “We live in a world that has practically no appreciation for quality, tradition, or classiness, and in which people who can’t spell even common words get to decide what survives. That.”

— Bill Bryson

426. “22 million tonnes of such unwanted fish are dumped back in the sea each year, mostly in the form of corpses.”

— Bill Bryson

427. “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

428. “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

429. “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

430. “Instead, we were given the period of unusual tranquillity known as the Holocene, the time in which we live now.”

— Bill Bryson

431. “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

432. “Not every visitor was enchanted. William Morris, the future designer and aesthete, then aged seventeen, was so appalled by what he saw as the exhibition’s lack of taste and veneration of excess that he staggered from the building and was sick in the bushes.”

— Bill Bryson

433. “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

434. “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

435. “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

436. “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

437. “Although there was no reliable way of dating periods, there was no shortage of people willing to try. The most well known early attempt30 was made in 1650, when Archbishop James Ussher of the Church of Ireland made a careful study of the Bible and other historical sources and concluded, in a hefty tome called Annals of the Old Testament, that the Earth had been created at midday on 23 October 4004 BC, an assertion that has amused historians and textbook writers ever since.”

— Bill Bryson

438. “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

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

— Bill Bryson

440. “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

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

— Bill Bryson

442. “Thank you,” I said and then abruptly leaned across the counter and with two forked fingers poked him sharply in the eyes. Actually, I didn’t do that. I just imagined it. But imagining it made me feel better. I.”

— Bill Bryson

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

— Bill Bryson

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

— Bill Bryson

445. “Indeed, if not told to live – if not given some kind of active instruction from another cell – cells automatically kill themselves. Cells need a lot of reassurance.”

— Bill Bryson

446. “We are the only creature that can harm at a distance.”

— Bill Bryson

447. “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

448. “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

449. “England?” she said with unreserved amazement. “Why do you live in England?” “Because it is nothing like Indianapolis.”

— Bill Bryson

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

— Bill Bryson