Bill Bryson Quotes & Sayings

The tragedy for so many town councils is that they think they can quietly cut spending and no one will notice or care. The tragedy for the country may be that they are right. But — Bill Bryson

The greater koa finch, an innocuous member of the honeycreeper family, lurked shyly in the canopies of koa trees, but if someone imitated its song it would abandon its cover at once and fly down in a show of welcome. — Bill Bryson

Pennsylvania one year paid out $90,000 in bounties for the killing of 130,000 owls and hawks to save the state's farmers a slightly less than whopping $1,875 in estimated livestock losses. (It is not very often, after all, that an owl carries off a cow.) — Bill Bryson

From a selection of his other works, we might think him variously courtly, cerebral, metaphysical, melancholic, Machiavellian, neurotic, lighthearted, loving, and much more. Shakespeare was of course all these things - as a writer. We hardly know what he was as a person. — Bill Bryson

Rees maintains that six numbers in particular govern our universe, and that if any of these values were changed even very slightly things could not be as they are. For example, for the universe to exist as it does requires that hydrogen be converted to helium in a precise but comparatively stately manner - specifically, in a way that converts seven one-thousandths of its mass to energy. Lower that value very slightly - from 0.007 percent to 0.006 percent, say - and no transformation could take place: the universe would consist of hydrogen and nothing else. Raise the value very slightly - to 0.008 percent - and bonding would be so wildly prolific that the hydrogen would long since have been exhausted. In either case, with the slightest tweaking of the numbers the universe as we know and need it would not be here. I — Bill Bryson

Report in The Economist as much as 97 per cent of the world's plant and animal species may still await discovery. Of — Bill Bryson

I ordered a pint of Cooper's Draught and retired with it to a table overlooking the square. And there I sat for a good few minutes doing nothing at all, not even touching my glass, just savoring the pleasure of sitting down and finding myself in a far country with a glass of beer and cricket on the TV and a roomful of people enjoying the fruits of a prosperous age. I could not have been happier. After — Bill Bryson

The transit of Venus of 1769 finally allowed us to determine the distance from the Earth to the Sun: 149.59 million kilometres. A — Bill Bryson

In this sense, according to Harding, every gene is a different highway, and we have only barely begun to map the routes. No single gene is ever going to tell you the whole story, — Bill Bryson

published in 1980, John McPhee noted that even then one American geologist in eight still didn't believe in plate tectonics. Today — Bill Bryson

I know a man who drives 600 yards to work. I know a woman who gets in her car to go a quarter of a mile to a college gymnasium to walk on a treadmill, then complains passionately about the difficulty of finding a parking space. 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

Even with the benefit of steroids most modern players still couldn't hit as many home runs as Babe Ruth hit on hotdogs. — Bill Bryson

We have better maps of Mars than we do of our own seabeds. At — Bill Bryson

The favourite activity is drinking a lot of beer and the second is throwing it up again) — Bill Bryson

like physics before it," Woese wrote, "has moved to a level where the objects of interest and their interactions often cannot be perceived through direct observation." In — Bill Bryson

When the poet Paul Valery once asked Albert Einstein if he kept a notebook to record his ideas, Einstein looked at him with mild but genuine surprise. "Oh, that's not necessary," he replied . "It's so seldom I have one. — Bill Bryson

There is only one place, an inconspicuous outpost of the Milky Way called the Earth, that will sustain you, and even it can be pretty grudging. From — Bill Bryson

The people are immensely likable - cheerful, extrovert, quick-witted, and unfailingly obliging. Their cities are safe and clean and nearly always built on water. They have a society that is prosperous, well ordered, and instinctively egalitarian. The food is excellent. The beer is cold. The sun nearly always shines. There is coffee on every corner. Life doesn't get much better than this. — Bill Bryson

There is a phenomenon called Trail Magic, known and spoken of with reverence by everyone who hikes the trail, which holds that often when things look darkest some little piece of serendipity comes along to put you back on a heavenly plane. — Bill Bryson

Until almost the 20th century, Central Park was home to a shepherd and a flock of 200 sheep. — Bill Bryson

I somberly reflected that the history of the Highlands is five hundred years of cruelty and bloodshed followed by two hundred years of way too much bagpipe music. — Bill Bryson

There is no law that requires the universe to fill itself with small particles of matter or to produce light and gravity and the other properties on which our existence hinges. — Bill Bryson

Very little of what America does is actually bad, and I don't think it ever does anything anywhere that is intentionally bad. I mean, sometimes we make mistakes and bad judgments and kind of back the wrong regimes and things, but by and large what America does is really good. — Bill Bryson

Two billion years bacterial organisms were the only forms of life. They lived, they reproduced, they swarmed, but they didn't show any particular inclination to move on to another, more challenging level of existence. — Bill Bryson

I wish I could adjust my voice, but it's just what's happened to me. It's because I've lived abroad for a long time, and my wife is English and my kids all have English accents, and every voice I hear is English. I've never intentionally changed my accent at all. — Bill Bryson

Goldilocks effect" - that everything is just right. (For the record, these three possible universes are known respectively as closed, open and flat.) Now, — Bill Bryson

In the summer of 1876 in Montana while George Armstrong Custer and his troops were being cut down at Little Big Horn, Cope was out hunting for bones nearby. When it was pointed out to him that this was probably not the most prudent time to be taking treasures from Indian lands, Cope thought for a minute and decided to press on anyway. — Bill Bryson

among them Pleistocene ("most recent"), Pliocene ("more recent"), Miocene ("moderately recent") and the rather endearingly vague Oligocene ("but a little recent"). — Bill Bryson

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

The older you get the more it seems the world belongs to other people. — Bill Bryson

Look, if you draw a two thousand-mile-long line across the United States at any angle, it's going to pass through nine murder victims. — Bill Bryson

Every atom you possess has almost certainly passed through several stars and been part of millions of organisms on its way to becoming you. We are each so atomically numberous and so vigorously recycled at death that a significant number of our atoms-up to a billion for each of us, it has been suggested-probably once belonged to Shakespeare. A billion more each came from Buddha and Genghis Khan and Beethoven, and any other historical figure you care to name. — Bill Bryson

Although I was always very happy in Britain, I never stopped thinking of America as home, in the fundamental sense of the term. It was where I came from, what I really understood, the base against which all else was measured. — Bill Bryson

So the first dinosaur bone ever found was also the first to be lost. — Bill Bryson

Physics is really nothing more than a search for ultimate simplicity, but so far all we have is a kind of elegant messiness. — Bill Bryson

In my experience, the last people you want trying to solve any problem, but especially those involving roads, are highway engineers. They operate from the principle that while no traffic problem can ever truly be solved, it can be spread over a much larger area. — Bill Bryson

After years of patient study (and with cricket there can be no other kind), I have decided that there is nothing wrong with the game that the introduction of golf carts wouldn't fix in a hurry. — Bill Bryson

When authorities learned that Eugene O'Neill's play All God's Chillun proposed to show black and white children playing together as if that were normal, the district attorney for Manhattan sent the police to stop it. — Bill Bryson

one cannot "predict future events exactly if one cannot even measure the present state of the universe precisely! — Bill Bryson

For almost four billion years life had dawdled along without any detectable ambitions in the direction of complexity, and then suddenly, in the space of just five or ten million years, it had created all the basic body designs still in use today. — Bill Bryson

There is no question that a Neanderthal could easily beat us up. So, too, presumably could their women, which may be why we are only 2 percent Neanderthal instead of 50 percent. Those bitches were too scary for us. — Bill Bryson

You have three chromosomes, Bryson. X, Y, and Fuckhead.
Katz — Bill Bryson

I don't want to go and start trying to make jokes in places like India, Tanzania or Iraq. Afghanistan is not a funny place. — Bill Bryson

It was the kind of pure, undiffused light that can only come from a really hot blue sky, the kind that makes even a concrete highway painful to behold and turns every distant reflective surface into a little glint of flame. Do you know how sometimes on very fine days the sun will shine with a particular intensity that makes the most mundane objects in the landscape glow with an unusual radiance, so that buildings and structures you normally pass without a glance suddenly become arresting, even beautiful? Well, they seem to have that light in Australia nearly all the time. — Bill Bryson

Among the many thousands of things that I have never been able to understand, one in particular stands out. That is the question of who was the first person who stood by a pile of sand and said, "You know, I bet if we took some of this and mixed it with a little potash and heated it, we could make a material that would be solid and yet transparent. We could call it glass." Call me obtuse, but you could stand me on a beach till the end of time and never would it occur to me to try to make it into windows. — Bill Bryson

I often feel I'm a disappointment to people because they expect me to be the guy in the books. When I sit next to someone at a dinner party I can see they expect me to be quick and witty, and I'm not at all. — Bill Bryson

It occurred to me that Australians are so surrounded with danger that they have evolved an entirely new vocabulary to deal with it. — Bill Bryson

However senior or accomplished, they were not allowed into the college's senior common room but instead had to take their meals in a more utilitarian chamber — Bill Bryson

By the eighteenth century the most reliable way to get a bath was to be insane. Then they could hardly soak you enough. In 1701, Sir John Floyer began to make a case for cold bathing as a cure for any number of maladies. His theory was that plunging a body into chilly water produced a sensation of "Terror and Surprize" which invigorated dulled and jaded senses. — Bill Bryson

The indigestible parts of giant squid, in particular their beaks, accumulate in sperm whales' stomachs into the substance known as ambergris, which is used as a fixative in perfumes. The next time you spray on Chanel Number 5 (assuming you do), you may wish to reflect that you are dousing yourself in distillate of unseen sea monster. — Bill Bryson

hadrons" - a collective term used by physicists for protons, neutrons and other particles governed by the strong nuclear force. — Bill Bryson

Steller's sea cow, named after the German naturalist Georg Steller, who discovered a small community of them living on Bering Island, off the coat of Siberia, in 1741. Hunted mercilessly by humans, within thirty years of its discovery by Steller this remarkable species was extinct. — Bill Bryson

My mother only ever said two things. She said,'I don't know, dear.'And she said,'Can I get you a sandwich, honey? — Bill Bryson

In any area of human endeavour, there is going to be mediocrity. You're going to find people who get money that they shouldn't get. — Bill Bryson

Rarely has a man been more comfortable with his own greatness. He spent much of his leisure time penning long and flattering portraits of himself, declaring that there had never 'been a greater botanist or zoologist', and that his system of classification was 'the greatest achievement in the realm of science'. Modestly, he suggested that his gravestone should bear the inscription Princeps Botanicorum, 'Prince of Botanists'. It was never wise to question his generous self-assessments. Those who did so were apt to find they had weeds named after them. — Bill Bryson

Shakespeare 'never owned a book,' a writer for the New York Times gravely informed readers in one doubting article in 2002. The statement cannot actually be refuted, for we know nothing about his incidental possessions. But the writer might just as well have suggested that Shakespeare never owned a pair of shoes or pants. For all the evidence tells us, he spent his life naked from the waist down, as well as bookless, but it is probably that what is lacking is the evidence, not the apparel or the books. — Bill Bryson

It is natural but wrong to visualize the singularity as a kind of pregnant dot hanging in a dark, boundless void. But there is no space, no darkness. The singularity has no "around" around it. There is no space for it to occupy, no place for it to be. We can't even ask how long it has been there - whether it has just lately popped into being, like a good idea, or whether it has been there forever, quietly awaiting the right moment. Time doesn't exist. There is no past for it to emerge from. — Bill Bryson

Sabine Baring-Gould wrote the hymn "Onward, Christian Soldiers" and, more unexpectedly, the first novel to feature a werewolf. — Bill Bryson

I had recently read that 3.7 million Americans, according to a Gallup poll, believed that they had been abducted by aliens at one time or another, so it was clear that my people needed me.
On his move back to America after living in England for twenty years. — Bill Bryson

In the morning a new man was behind the front desk. "And how did you enjoy your stay, Sir?" he asked smoothly.
"It was singularly execrable," I replied.
"Oh, excellent," he purred, taking my card
"In fact, I would go so far as to say that the principal value of a stay in this establishment is that it is bound to make all subsequent service-related experiences seem, in comparison, refreshing."
He made a deeply appreciative expression as if to say, "Praise indeed," and presnted my bill for signature. "Well, we hope you'll come again."
"I would sooner have bowel surgery in the woods with a a stick."
His expression wavered, then held there for a long moment. "Excellent," he said again, but without a great show of conviction. — Bill Bryson

There seemed to be a mystifying universal conspiracy among textbook authors to make certain the material they dealt with never strayed too near the realm of the mildly interesting and was always at least a long-distance phone call from the frankly interesting. — Bill Bryson

It was known as the Sick Man of Europe. It was in every way poorer than now. Yet there were flowerbeds on 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. If we could afford it then, why not now? Someone needs to explain to me how it is that the richer Britain gets the poorer it thinks itself. — Bill Bryson

Nobody knows quite how destructive human beings are, but it is a fact that over the last fifty thousand years or so, wherever we have gone animals have tended to vanish, often in astonishingly large numbers. In — Bill Bryson

Nowadays, and speaking very generally, geological time is divided first into four great chunks known as eras: Precambrian, Palaeozoic (from the Greek meaning "old life"), Mesozoic ("middle life") and Cenozoic ("recent life"). These four eras are further divided into anywhere from a dozen to twenty subgroups, — Bill Bryson

The current best estimate for the Earth's weight is 5.9725 billion trillion tonnes, — Bill Bryson

What this means in practice is that if you are not a born worrier you have nothing to worry about (though of course you wouldn't be worrying anyway), whereas if you are a worrier by nature there is absolutely nothing you can do about it, so you may as well stop worrying, except of course you can't. — Bill Bryson

I had to drive to Minneapolis once, and went on a back road just to see the country. But there was nothing to see. It's just flat and hot, and full of corn and soybeans and hogs. Every once in a while you come across a farm or some dead little town where the liveliest thing is the flies. — Bill Bryson

I could give you a long list of things I like about Britain, but essentially what it comes down to is that I feel about Britain the same way I feel about my wife. I'm crazy about my wife - we just kind of suit each other. I wouldn't say that she's the most fantastic human being that's ever lived, but she is for me. — Bill Bryson

Among the tiny atomic structures the plankton take to the grave with them are two very stable isotopes - oxygen-16 and oxygen-18. — Bill Bryson

In some odd way that you don't understand and can't begin to articulate you feel and acquaintance with it--a familiarity on an unfamiliar level. Somewhere in the deep sediment of your being some long-dormant fragment of primordial memory, some little severed tail of DNA, has twitched or stirred. It is a motion much too faint to be understood or interpreted, but somehow you feel certain that this large, brooding, hypnotic presence has an importance to you at a species level--perhaps even at a sort of tadpole level--and that in some way your visit here is more than happenstance. — Bill Bryson

Moreover, all this applies only to units of time. Rocks are divided into quite separate units known as systems, series and stages. — Bill Bryson

Thoreau was an idiot. — Bill Bryson

Just a month after the completion of the Declaration of Independence, at a time when he delegates might have been expected to occupy themselves with more pressing concerns -like how they were going to win the war and escape hanging- Congress quite extraordinarily found time to debate business for a motto for the new nation. (Their choice, E Pluribus Unum, "One from Many", was taken from, of all places, a recipe for salad in an early poem by Virgil.) — Bill Bryson

Worse still, it isn't actually necessary to look to space for petrifying danger. As we are about to see, Earth can provide plenty of danger of its own. — Bill Bryson

Nothing - really, absolutely nothing - says more about Victorian Britain and its capacity for brilliance than that the century's most daring and iconic building was entrusted to a gardener. — Bill Bryson

Not writing the same kind of book over and over again is to me the real pleasure of what I do. — Bill Bryson

He was disorganized, forgetful, perpetually dissolute, and famous for his tremendous benders. One year he missed fifty straight weekly meetings at the Office of Works. His supervision of the office was so poor that one man was discovered to have been on holiday for three years. When sober, however, he was much liked and widely praised for his charm, good nature, and architectural vision. A bust of him in the National Portrait Gallery in London shows him clean shaven (and indeed clean, a slightly unusual condition for him), with a very full head of hair and a face that seems curiously mournful or perhaps just slightly hungover. Despite — Bill Bryson

Where I grew up, in Des Moines, Iowa, there is hardly any downtown economic activity now. Everybody shops in malls - you don't find a sense of community in malls. — Bill Bryson

Queen Elizabeth, in a much-cited quote, faithfully bathed once a month "whether she needs it or no. — Bill Bryson

Cheapness is a great virtue. — Bill Bryson

Although the creation of a universe might be very unlikely, Tryon emphasized that no one had counted the failed attempts." Martin — Bill Bryson

I see litter as part of a long continuum of anti-social behaviour. — Bill Bryson

I have long known that it is part of God's plan for me to spend a little time with each of the most stupid people on earth, and Mary Ellen was proof that even in the Appalachian woods I would not be spared. It became evident that she was a rarity. — Bill Bryson

The few surviving photographs of Childe certainly confirm that he was no beauty - he was skinny and chinless, with squinting eyes behind owlish spectacles, and a mustache that looked as if it might at any moment stir to life and crawl away - but whatever unkind things people might say about the outside of his head, the inside was a place of golden splendor. — Bill Bryson

I ended up with enough equipment to bring full employment to a vale of sherpas - — Bill Bryson

In January of that year, according to a report written in America by a Times reporter, scientists were seriously investigating the possibility that a mysterious seismic disturbance in the remote Australian outback almost four years earlier had been a nuclear explosion set off by members of the Japanese doomsday cult Aum Shinrikyo. — Bill Bryson

A diarist named George Templeton Strong recorded in the winter of 1866 that even with two furnaces alight and all the fireplaces blazing, he couldn't get the temperature of his Boston home above 38 degrees Fahrenheit. — Bill Bryson

On Fifth Avenue I went into the Trump Tower, a new skyscraper. A guy named Donald Trump, a developer, is slowly taking over New York, building skyscrapers all over town with his name on them, so I went in and had a look around. The building had the most tasteless lobby I had ever seen
all brass and chrome and blotchy red and white marble that looked like the sort of thing that if you saw it on the sidewalk you would walk around it. Here it was everywhere
on the floors, up the walls , on the ceiling. It was like being inside somebody's stomach after he'd eaten pizza. — Bill Bryson

... I would submit that if you think the only people you should have in your country are the people you produce yourselves, you are an idiot. — Bill Bryson

In 1856, shortly before his death, Lord Ellesmere gave the painting to the new National Portrait Gallery in London as its founding work. As the gallery's first acquisition, it has a certain sentimental prestige, but almost at once its authenticity was doubted. — Bill Bryson

We were idiots really, but awfully happy, too. — Bill Bryson

I quite like Torquay and might one day come back, but I can tell you this now: where watch batteries are concerned, they can go fuck themselves. — Bill Bryson

Taxonomy is described sometimes as a science and sometimes as an art, but really it's a battleground. — Bill Bryson

Stairs incorporate three pieces of geometry: rise, going, and pitch. The rise is the height between steps, the going is the step itself (technically, the distance between the leading edges, or nosings, of two successive steps measured horizontally), and the pitch is the overall steepness of the stairway. — Bill Bryson

In my day the principal concerns of university students were sex, smoking dope, rioting and learning. Learning was something you did only when the first three weren't available. — Bill Bryson

The Moon is slipping from our grasp at a rate of about 1.5 inches a year. In another two billion years it will have receded so far that it won't keep us steady and we will have to come up with some other solution, but in the meantime you should think of it as much more than just a pleasant feature in the night sky. — Bill Bryson

I would rather have bowel surgery in the woods with a stick. If you are not stung or pronged to death in some unexpected manner, you may be fatally chomped by sharks or crocodiles, or carried helplessly out to sea by irresistible currents, or left to stagger to an unhappy death in the baking outback. — Bill Bryson

I hate asking directions. I am always afraid that the person I approach will step back and say, 'You want to go where? The centre of Brussels? Boy, are you lost. This is Lille, you dumb shit,' then stop other passers-by and say, 'You wanna hear something classic? Buddy, tell these people where you think you are,' and that I'll have to push my way through a crowd of people who are falling about and wiping tears of mirth from their eyes. So I trudged on. — Bill Bryson

the basement. Katz — Bill Bryson

wanted to be puzzled and charmed, to experience the endless, beguiling variety of a continent where you can board a train and an hour later be somewhere where the inhabitants speak a different language, eat different foods, work different hours, live lives that are at once so different and yet so oddly similar. I wanted to be a tourist. But — Bill Bryson