Top 500 Bill Bryson Quotes (2026 Update)
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401. “When you tell an Iowan a joke, you can see a kind of race going on between his brain and his expression.”

— Bill Bryson

402. “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

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

— Bill Bryson

404. “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

405. “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

406. “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

407. “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

408. “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

409. “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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410. “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

411. “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

412. “22 million tonnes of such unwanted fish are dumped back in the sea each year, mostly in the form of corpses.”

— Bill Bryson

413. “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

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

— Bill Bryson

415. “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

416. “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

417. “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

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

— Bill Bryson

419. “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

420. “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

421. “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

422. “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

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

— Bill Bryson

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

— Bill Bryson

425. “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

426. “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

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

— Bill Bryson

428. “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

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

— Bill Bryson

430. “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

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

— Bill Bryson

432. “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

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

— Bill Bryson

434. “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

435. “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

436. “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

437. “We started this chapter with three points: life wants to be; life doesn’t always want to be much; life from time to time goes extinct. To this we may add a fourth: life goes on. And often, as we shall see, it goes on in ways that are decidedly amazing.”

— Bill Bryson

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

— Bill Bryson

439. “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

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

— Bill Bryson

441. “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

442. “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

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

— Bill Bryson

444. “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

445. “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

446. “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

447. “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

448. “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

449. “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

450. “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