Bill Bryson Quotes

168 Sourced Quotes

You have three chromosomes, Bryson. X, Y, and Fuckhead.

Bill Bryson
I refer of course to the soaring wonder of the age known as the Eiffel Tower. Never in history has a structure been more technologically advanced, materially obsolescent, and gloriously pointless all at the same time.

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
… I had some suggestions [about fencing]. I thought that you could encourage surprise attacks. I thought that would be very good. I kind of liked the idea of arming one guy with a conventional sword but giving the other a pikestaff. My favourite was the idea of blindfolding one of the competitors or blindfolding them both and spinning them around a bit so they were a little bit unstable and then just pushing them towards each other. It would make each match go on a bit longer.

Bill Bryson
In France, a chemist named Pilatre de Rozier tested the flammability of hydrogen by gulping a mouthful and blowing across an open flame, proving at a stroke that hydrogen is indeed explosively combustible and that eyebrows are not necessarily a permanent feature of one's face.

Bill Bryson
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
Wow, look at all the places you can park, he said, as if for all these years he had been cruising endlessly, unable to terminate a journey. For about a year the most dangerous place to drive in Des Moines was the parking lot of Merle Hay Mall because of all the cars speeding at joyous random angles across its boundless blacktop without reflecting that other happy souls might be doing likewise.

Bill Bryson
On April 3, 1956, according to news reports, a Mrs. Julia Chase of Hagerstown, Maryland, while on a tour of the White House, slipped away from her tour group and vanished into the heart of the building. For four and a half hours, Mrs. Chase, who was described later as dishevelled, vague and not quite lucid, wandered through the White House, setting small fires—five in all. That's how tight security was in those days: a not-quite-lucid woman was able to roam unnoticed through the executive mansion for more than half a working day.

Bill Bryson
Coming back to your native land after an absence of many years is a surprisingly unsettling business, a little like waking from a long coma. Time, you discover, has wrought changes that leave you feeling mildly foolish and out of touch.

Bill Bryson
Why is it that women... find it so unsettling if you spend more than four minutes a day on the toilet?

Bill Bryson
I do find London exciting. Much as I hate to agree with that tedious old git Samuel Johnson, and despite the pompous imbecility of his famous remark about when a man is tired of London he is tired of life...I can't dispute it.

Bill Bryson
I had to calm down because a state trooper pulled up alongside me at a traffic light and began looking at me with that sort of casual disdain you often get when you give a dangerously stupid person a gun and a squad car.

Bill Bryson
As Edward P. Tryon of Columbia University once put it: "In answer to the question of why it happened, I offer the modest proposal that our universe is simply one of those things that happen from time to time." To which adds Guth: "Although the creation of a universe might be very unlikely, Tryon emphasized that no one had counted the failed attempts."

Bill Bryson
Every kid I knew had a father with a little stash of men's magazines which the father thought was secret and which the kid knew all about.

Bill Bryson
Let's be frank, the Italians' technological contribution to humankind stopped with the pizza oven.

Bill Bryson
"Croissant": However you choose to pronounce it at home, it is perhaps worth nothing that outside the United States, the closer you can come to saying "kwass-ohn," the sooner you can expect to be presented with one.

Bill Bryson
English is full of booby traps for the unwary foreigner. Any language where the unassuming word fly signifies an annoying insect, a means of travel, and a critical part of a gentleman's apparel is clearly asking to be mangled.

Bill Bryson
Atoms are fickle and their time of devotion is fleeting - fleeting indeed. Even a long human life adds up to only about 650,000 hours. And when that modest milestone flashes past, or at some other point thereabouts, for reasons unknown your atoms will shut you down, silently disassemble, and go off to be other things.

Bill Bryson
Open your refrigerator door, and you summon forth more light than the total amount enjoyed by most households in the 18th century. The world at night, for much of history, was a very dark place indeed.

Bill Bryson
Four times I was honked at for having the temerity to proceed through town without the benefit of metal.

Bill Bryson
To my surprise, I felt a certain springy keenness. I was ready to hike. I had waited months for this day, after all, even if it had been mostly with foreboding. I wanted to see what was out there. All over America today people would be dragging themselves to work, stuck in traffic jams, wreathed in exhaust smoke. I was going for a walk in the woods. I was more than ready for this.

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
I have a small tattered clipping that I sometimes carry with meand pull out for purposes of privateamusement. It's a weather forecast from theWestern Daily Mail and it says, in toto: 'Outlook: Dry and warm, but cooler with some rain.

Bill Bryson
When I was growing up I used to think that the best thing about coming from Des Moines was that it meant you didn't come from anywhere else in Iowa. By Iowa standards, Des Moines is a mecca of cosmopolitanism, a dynamic hub of wealth and education, where people wear three-piece suits and dark socks, often simultaneously.

Bill Bryson
It is always quietly thrilling to find yourself looking at a world you know well but have never seen from such an angle before.

Bill Bryson
It sometimes occurs to me that the British have more heritage than isgood for them.

Bill Bryson
Finally, this being America, there is the constant possibility of murder.

Bill Bryson
The remarkable position in which we find ourselves is that we don't actually know what we actually know.

Bill Bryson
I think it's only right that crazy people should have their own city, but I cannot for the life of me see why a sane person would want to go there.

Bill Bryson
If a potato can produce vitamin C, why can't we? Within the animal kingdom only humans and guinea pigs are unable to synthesize vitamin C in their own bodies. Why us and guinea pigs? No point asking. Nobody knows.

Bill Bryson