Top 500 Bill Bryson Quotes (2024 Update)
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401. “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

402. “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

403. “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

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

— Bill Bryson

405. “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

406. “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

407. “Fears have been raised that in their enthusiasm scientists might inadvertently create a black hole or even something called “strange quarks,” which could, theoretically, interact with other subatomic particles and propagate uncontrollably. If you are reading this, that hasn’t happened. Finding.”

— Bill Bryson

408. “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

409. “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

410. “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

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

— Bill Bryson

412. “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

413. “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

414. “Of the total surface area of Earth, Britain occupies just 0.0174069 per cent.”

— Bill Bryson

415. “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

416. “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

417. “The amount of energy actually liberated in the burning of these fossil fuels is tiny by planetary scales – ten terawatts or so a year, not that much more than the nuga-tory contribution made by the tides. But the side effects are huge.”

— Bill Bryson

418. “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

419. “It would be hard to believe that the continuous movement of tectonic plates has no effect on the development of life on earth.”

— Bill Bryson

420. “The older you get the more it seems the world belongs to other people.”

— Bill Bryson

421. “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

422. “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

423. “In nearly every year for at least 250 years, deaths outnumbered births in London.”

— Bill Bryson

424. “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

425. “Every dog on the face of the earth wants me dead.”

— Bill Bryson

426. “I have been told more than once in fact that one of the more trying things about learning to live with the Germans after the war was having to watch them return with their wives and girlfriends to show off the places they had helped to ruin.”

— Bill Bryson

427. “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

428. “Most of what has lived on Earth has left behind no record at all.”

— Bill Bryson

429. “I can wear a baseball cap; I am entitled to wear a baseball cap. I am genetically pre-disposed to wear a baseball cap, whereas most English people look wrong in a baseball cap.”

— Bill Bryson

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

— Bill Bryson

431. “Welcome. And congratulations. I am delighted that you could make it. Getting here wasn’t easy, I know. In fact, I suspect it was a little tougher than you realize.”

— Bill Bryson

432. “It fascinated me that Europeans could at once be so alike – that they could be so universally bookish and cerebral, and drive small cars, and live in little houses in ancient towns, and love soccer, and be relatively unmaterialistic and law-abiding, and have chilly hotel rooms and cosy and inviting places to eat and drink – and yet be so endlessly, unpredictably different from each other as well. I loved the idea that you could never be sure of anything in Europe.”

— Bill Bryson

433. “Widespread commercial distribution of ice was so new that 300 tons of the precious commodity melted at one port while customs officials tried to figure out how to classify it.”

— Bill Bryson

434. “The friendliness of Australians – all of it quite sincere and spontaneous, as far as I could ever tell – never ceases to amaze or gratify.”

— Bill Bryson

435. “Altogether, 80 percent of all autoimmune diseases occur in women. Hormones are the presumed culprit, but how exactly female hormones trip up the immune system when male hormones don’t is not at all clear.”

— Bill Bryson

436. “Owen. He coined the term Dinosauria in 1841. It means ‘terrible lizard’ and was a curiously inapt name.”

— Bill Bryson

437. “There is the odd exception, like Albert Einstein, but as a breed, scientists tend not be very good at presenting themselves.”

— Bill Bryson

438. “The rooms were small and airless and cramped. To make matters worse, somebody in our group was making the most dreadful silent farts. Fortunately, it was me, so I wasn’t nearly as bothered as the others.”

— Bill Bryson

439. “The richer the country, the more allergies its citizens get.”

— Bill Bryson

440. “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

441. “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

442. “It’s a funny thing because Britain was in a terrible state in those days. It limped from crisis to crisis. It was known as the Sick Man of Europe. It was in every way poorer than now. Yet there were flower beds in roundabouts, libraries and post offices in every village, cottage hospitals in abundance, council housing for all who needed it. It was a country so comfortable and enlightened that hospitals maintained cricket pitches for their staff and mental patients lived in Victorian palaces.”

— Bill Bryson

443. “Homo erectus was the first to hunt, the first to use fire, the first to fashion complex tools, the first to leave evidence of campsites, the first to look after the weak and frail.”

— Bill Bryson

444. “It is fairly amazing to reflect that at the beginning of the twentieth century, and for some years beyond, the best scientific minds in the world couldn’t actually tell you, in any meaningful way, where babies came from.”

— Bill Bryson

445. “Work expands to fill the time available for its completion,” still known as Parkinson’s Law.”

— Bill Bryson

446. “On the fourth night, just as I was facing the dismal prospect of finishing my only book and thereafter having nothing to do in the evenings but lie in the half light and listen to Katz snore, I was delighted, thrilled, sublimely gratified to find that some earlier user had left a Graham Greene paperback. If there’s one thing the AT teaches, it is low level ecstasy, something we can all do with more of in our lives.”

— Bill Bryson

447. “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

448. “For anyone of a rational disposition, fashion is often nearly impossible to fathom. Throughout many periods of history – perhaps most – it can seem as if the whole impulse of fashion has been to look maximally ridiculous. If one could be maximally uncomfortable as well, the triumph was all the greater.”

— Bill Bryson

449. “These are all just informed guesses.”

— Bill Bryson

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

— Bill Bryson