Bill Bryson Quotes

168 Sourced Quotes

"Virginia?" he said, as if I had asked him if there was anywhere local we could get a dose of syphilis.

Bill Bryson
Everywhere throughout New England you find old, tumbledown field walls, often in the middle of the deepest, most settled- looking woods- a reminder of just how swiftly nature reclaims the land in America.

Bill Bryson
All that can really be said is that at some indeterminate point in the very distant past, for reasons unknown, there came the moment known to science as t = 0. We were on our way.

Bill Bryson
A friend Alan and I ended up in an Outback pub in a place called Daly Waters and apparently, he says, in the course of this very lively evening we spent there I offered to do a house swap with a family from Korea. We weren't sure whether they were from North Korea or South Korea.

Bill Bryson
By almost universal agreement, the most vague and ineffectual of all [Presidents] was Millard Fillmore, who succeeded to the office in 1850 upon the death of Zachary Taylor, and spent the next three years demonstrating how the country would have been run if they had just propped Taylor up in a chair with cushions.

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
And I find chopsticks frankly distressing. Am I alone in thinking it odd that a people ingenious enough to invent paper, gunpowder, kites and any number of other useful objects, and who have a noble history extending back 3,000 years haven't yet worked out that a pair of knitting needles is no way to capture food?

Bill Bryson
Language, never forget, is more fashion than science, and matters of usage, spelling, and pronunciation tend to wander around like hemlines.

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
We used to build civilizations. Now we build shopping malls.

Bill Bryson
[I relaxed] my customary aversion to consulting a book by anyone so immensely pratty as to put "Ph. D." after his name (I don't put Ph. D. after my name on my books, after all — and not just because I don't have one).

Bill Bryson
Beulah has a husband?' I know. It's a miracle. There can't be more than two people on the planet who'd be willing to sleep with her, and here we are both in the same town.

Bill Bryson
Out of the thirty thousand types of edible plants thought to exist on Earth, just eleven—corn, rice, wheat, potatoes, cassava, sorghum, millet, beans, barley, rye, and oats—account for 93 percent of all that humans eat, and every one of them was first cultivated by our Neolithic ancestors.

Bill Bryson
He had the sort of face that makes you realise God does have a sense of humour.

Bill Bryson
It is natural human impulse to think of evolution as a long chain of improvements, of a never-ending advance towards largeness and complexity — in a word, towards us. We flatter ourselves. Most of the real diversity in evolution has been small-scale. We large things are just flukes — an interesting side branch.

Bill Bryson
Perhaps it's my natural pessimism, but it seems that an awfully large part of travel these days is to see things while you still can.

Bill Bryson
Why, it's a perfect little city. If you have never been to Durham, go there at once. Take my car. It's wonderful.

Bill Bryson
Of all the things I am not very good at, living in the real world is perhaps the most outstanding.

Bill Bryson
England was full of words I'd never heard before - streaky bacon, short back and sides, Belisha beacon, serviettes, high tea, ice-cream cornet.

Bill Bryson
For a long time it puzzled me how something so expensive, so leading edge, could be so useless. And then it occurred to me that a computer is a stupid machine with the ability to do incredibly smart things, while computer programmers are smart people with the ability to do incredibly stupid things. They are, in short, a perfect match.

Bill Bryson
I don't care how paranoid and irrational this makes me sound, but I know for a fact that the people of Paris want me dead.

Bill Bryson
Take a moment from time to time to remember that you are alive. I know this sounds a trifle obvious, but it is amazing how little time we take to remark upon this singular and gratifying fact. By the most astounding stroke of luck an infinitesimal portion of all the matter in the universe came together to create you and for the tiniest moment in the great span of eternity you have the incomparable privilege to exist.

Bill Bryson
My father liked Iowa. He lived his whole life in the state, and is even now working his way through eternity there, in Glendale Cemetery in Des Moines.

Bill Bryson
But what is life to a lichen? Yet its impulse to exist, to be, is every bit as strong as ours — arguably even stronger. If I were told that I had to spend decades being a furry growth on a rock in the woods, I believe I would lose the will to go on.

Bill Bryson
As a rule of thumb, I would submit that if you need to call your floss provider, for any reason, you are probably not ready for this level of oral hygiene.

Bill Bryson