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

402. “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

403. “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

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

— Bill Bryson

405. “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

406. “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

407. “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

408. “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

409. “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

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

— Bill Bryson

411. “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

412. “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

413. “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

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

— Bill Bryson

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

— Bill Bryson

416. “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

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

— Bill Bryson

418. “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

419. “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

420. “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

421. “In 1956 he was found to be carrying a large and diversified collection of pornographic material, and he was invited to take his sordid continental habits elsewhere. Thus he was unable to enjoy, as it were, his own finest erection.”

— Bill Bryson

422. “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

423. “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

424. “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

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425. “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

426. “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

427. “22 million tonnes of such unwanted fish are dumped back in the sea each year, mostly in the form of corpses.”

— Bill Bryson

428. “Hobson’s choice is sometimes taken to mean a dilemma or difficult decision, but in fact means no choice at all. It derives from a sixteenth-century Cambridge stable-keeper named Thomas Hobson, who hired out horses on a strict rotation. The customer was allowed to take the one nearest the stable door or none at all.”

— Bill Bryson

429. “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

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

— Bill Bryson

431. “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

432. “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

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

— Bill Bryson

434. “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

435. “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

436. “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

437. “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

438. “Looking for a supernova, therefore, was a little like standing on the observation platform of the Empire State Building with a telescope and searching windows around Manhattan in the hope of finding, let us say, someone lighting a twenty-first birthday cake.”

— Bill Bryson

439. “Cook was a brilliant navigator and a conscientious observer, but he made one critical mistake on his first voyage: he took Australia’s wet season for its dry one, and concluded that the country was more hospitable than it was.”

— Bill Bryson

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

— Bill Bryson

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

— Bill Bryson

442. “If this book has a lesson, it is that we are awfully lucky to be here-and by ‘we’ I mean every living thing. To attain any kind of life in this universe of ours appears to be quite an achievement. As humans we are doubly lucky, of course: We enjoy not only the privilege of existence but also the singular ability to appreciate it and even, in a multitude of ways, to make it better. It is a talent we have only barely begun to grasp.”

— Bill Bryson

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

— Bill Bryson

444. “By the late eighteenth century Britain’s statute books were plump with capital offences; you could be hanged for any of 200 acts, including, notably, ‘impersonating an Egyptian’.”

— Bill Bryson

445. “Take it from me, if you are in an open space with no weapons and a grizzly comes for you, run. You may as well. If nothing else, it will give you something to do with the last seven seconds of your life.”

— Bill Bryson

446. “Anyone who has read my books will know that I don’t tend to use guides when I am travelling. It’s not a pride thing, but it is certainly a fact.”

— Bill Bryson

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

— Bill Bryson

448. “I ordered a coffee and a little something to eat and savored the warmth and dryness. Somewhere in the background Nat King Cole sang a perky tune. I watched the rain beat down on the road outside and told myself that one day this would be twenty years ago.”

— Bill Bryson

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

— Bill Bryson

450. “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