Bryson Quotes

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

Romans park their cars the way I would park if I had just spilled a beaker of hydrochloric acid on my lap. ~ Bill Bryson

18th century scientists, the French in particular, seldom did things simply if an absurdly demanding alternative was available. ~ 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

The one thing he didn't do was discover the comet that bears his name. ~ Bill Bryson

People are so addicted to convenience that they have become trapped in a vicious circle: The more labor-saving appliances they acquire, the harder they need to work; the harder they
work, the more labor-saving appliances they feel they need to acquire. ~ Bill Bryson

In short, there is just a great deal we don't know. ~ 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

By the time I had finished my coffee and returned to the streets, the rain had temporarily abated, but the streets were full of vast puddles where the drains where unable to cope with the volume of water. Correct me if I'm wrong, but you would think that if one nation ought by now to have mastered the science of drainage, Britain would be it. ~ Bill Bryson

I've been wanting to do a book about baseball for the longest time, and nobody will let me do it. It's the one thing from America I really miss. ~ Bill Bryson

He had a curiously stunted sense of humor and loved practical jokes that veered dangerously close to cruelty. Once on a hot day he filled a friend's water jug with kerosene and mirthfully stood by as the friend took a mighty swig. The friend ended up in the hospital. ~ Bill Bryson

The atoms that so liberally and congenially flock together to form living things on Earth are exactly the same atoms that decline to do it elsewhere. ~ Bill Bryson

BEFORE HE CAME INTO a lot of money in 1839, Richard Plantagenet Temple Nugent Brydges Chandos Grenville, second Duke of Buckingham and Chandos, led a largely uneventful life. ~ Bill Bryson

Nether Hambleton and Middle Hambleton ~ Bill Bryson

The basic challenge of any book is you know you're going to be working on it for three or four years or more. So you want to have a subject that will keep you engaged. ~ Bill Bryson

It is a curious feature of our existence that we come from a planet that is very good at promoting life but even better at extinguishing it. The ~ 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

They were Republicans, Nixon Republicans, and so didn't subscribe to the notion that laws are supposed to apply to all people equally. ~ Bill Bryson

ONE OF THE THINGS that happens when you get older is that you discover lots of new ways to hurt yourself. Recently, in France, I was hit square on the head by an automatic parking barrier, something I don't think I could have managed in my younger, more alert years. ~ 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

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

The kicker was an image of Bryson, naked as the day he was born, being chased by seven mermaids that were so angry they had sprouted legs. He'd never admitted exactly what he'd done. ~ James Dashner

Cressbrook Mill was operated mostly by orphans who were treated worse than abysmally. ~ Bill Bryson

99.99 percent of all species that have ever lived are no longer with us. ~ Bill Bryson

I can't think of anything that excites a greater sense of childlike wonder than to be in a country where you are ignorant of almost everything. ~ Bill Bryson

The climatic world is one world even if politically we are not. ~ Reid Bryson

There is still quite a lot of life out there, but it is mostly very small. According to a wildlife census by an ecologist at the University of Illinois named V. E. Shelford, a typical ten-square-mile block of eastern American forest holds almost 300,000 mammals - 220,000 mice and other small rodents, 63,500 squirrels and chipmunks, 470 deer, 30 foxes, and 5 black bears. ~ 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 ~ Bill Bryson

I adore being with Roberta. I adore being in her spiritual light. I adore being close to her talent and gifts. ~ Peabo 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

By modern standards the whole of greater London, including Southwark and Westminster, was small. It stretched only about two miles from north to south and three from east to west, and could be crossed on foot in not much more than an hour. ~ Bill Bryson

If you wish to end up as a moderately advanced, thinking society, you need to be at the right end of a very long chain of outcomes involving reasonable periods of stability interspersed with just the right amount of stress and challenge (ice ages appear to be especially helpful in this regard) and marked by a total absence of real cataclysm. As ~ Bill Bryson

It is perhaps dangerous to conclude too much about the character and intentions of a nation based on the snacks menu in a railway carriage, but I couldn't help wonder if Scottish nationalism hasn't gone a little too far now. I mean, these poor people are denying themselves simple comforts like KitKats and Cornish pasties and instead are eating neeps and foot medication on grounds of patriotism. Seems a bit unnecessary to me. ~ Bill Bryson

Strange as it may seem, wrote Richard Feynman, we understand the distribution of matter in the interior of the Sun far better than we understand the interior of the Earth. ~ Bill Bryson

Everyone has a supremely low moment somewhere along the AT, usually when the urge to quit the trail becomes almost overpowering. The irony of my moment was that I wanted to get back on the trail and didn't know how. I hadn't lost just Katz, my boon companion, but my whole sense of connectedness to the trail. I had lost my momentum, my feeling of purpose. In the most literal way I needed to find my feet again. ~ Bill Bryson

I tell the kids that, even in a childhood marked by despair and deprivation, I knew that no matter what happened, I still had my family, or at least the remnants of a family ripped apart by divorce and then glued back together in various odd arrangements through a series of ill- advised remarriages. It was good to know I had a solid foundation. ~ Bill Bryson

Most of the time I am sunk in thought, but at some point on each walk there comes a moment when I look up and notice, with a kind of first-time astonishment, the amazing complex delicacy of the words, the casual ease with which elemental things come together to form a composition that is
whatever the season, wherever I put my besotted gaze
perfect. ~ Bill Bryson

Assumed to be australopithecines because there are no other known candidates. I ~ Bill Bryson

People in the West like to shoot things. When they first got to the West they shot buffalo. Once there were 70 million buffalo on the plains and then the people of the West started blasting away at them. Buffalo are just cows with big heads. If you've ever looked a cow in the face and seen the unutterable depths of trust and stupidity that lie within, you will be able to guess how difficult it must have been for people in the West to track down buffalo and shoot them to pieces. By 1895, there were only 800 buffalo left, mostly in zoos and touring Wild West shows. With no buffalo left to kill, Westerners started shooting Indians. Between 1850 and 1890 they reduced the number of Indians in America from two million to 90,000.

Nowadays, thank goodness, both have made a recovery. Today there are 30,000 buffalo and 300,000 Indiands, and of course you are not allowed to shoot either, so all the Westerners have left to shoot at are road signs and each other, both of which they do rather a lot. There you have a capsule history of the West. ~ Bill Bryson

The English invented cricket to make other human endeavors look interesting. ~ 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

Velleity, which describes a mild desire, a wish or urge too slight to lead to action. ~ Bill Bryson

Part of the power of travel is that you stand a good chance of being hollowed out by it. ~ Bill Bryson

Carleton Coon of the University of Pennsylvania suggested that some modern races have different sources of origin, implying that some of us come from superior stock to others. ~ 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

You don't have to know anything about baseball to respond to Babe Ruth because he's just this magnificent human being. And a really good story because he was this kid who grew up essentially as an orphan, you know, had a tough life, and then he became the most successful baseball player ever. But he was also a really good guy. ~ Bill Bryson

If you can imagine a man having a vasectomy without anesthetic to the sound of frantic sitar-playing, you will have some idea of what popular Turkish music is like. ~ Bill Bryson

Norfolk specializes in odd pronunciations. Hautbois is hobbiss, Wymondham is windum, Costessey is cozzy, Postwick is pozzik. People often ask why that is. I'm not sure, but I think it is just something that happens when you sleep with close relatives. ~ Bill Bryson

Curiously, among the few survivors from this culinary onslaught is one that is most difficult to understand: the fish knife. Though it remains the standard instrument for dealing with fish of all kinds, no one has ever identified a single advantage conferred by its odd scalloped shape or worked out the original thinking behind it. There isn't a single kind of fish that it cuts better or bones more delicately than a conventional knife does. ~ Bill Bryson

It is natural to suppose that global warming would act as a useful counterweight to the Earth's tendency to plunge back into glacial conditions. However, as Kolbert has pointed out, when you are confronted with a fluctuating and unpredictable climate, 'the last thing you'd want to do is conduct a vast unsupervised experiment on it'. It has even been suggested, with more plausibility than would at first seem evident, that an ice age might actually be induced by a rise in temperatures. The idea is that a slight warming would enhance evaporation rates and increase cloud cover, leading in the higher latitudes to more persistent accumulations of snow. In fact, global warming could plausibly, if paradoxically, lead to powerful localized cooling in North America and northern Europe. ~ 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 seems madness to think that a society would rate marginal economic growth above a livable earth, but there you are. I had always assumed the reason to build a bigger economy was to make the world a better place. In fact, it appears, the reason to build a bigger economy is, well, to build a bigger economy. ~ Bill Bryson

Maybe you're worried that I won't seduce you? ~ Kathy Bryson

Working quickly was the trick of it. When Samuel Pepys underwent a lithotomy - the removal of a kidney stone - in 1658, the surgeon took just fifty seconds to get in and find and extract a stone about the size of a tennis ball. (That is, a seventeenth-century tennis ball, which was rather smaller than a modern one, but still a sphere of considerable dimension.) ~ Bill Bryson

You can't go to East Anglia and not visit Sutton Hoo. Well, you can, obviously, but you shouldn't. ~ 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

It is an extraordinary fact but a true one that there are thousands of men in Britain who will never need Viagra as long as steam trains are in operation. ~ Bill Bryson

The bone was sent to Dr. Caspar Wistar, the nation's leading anatomist, who described it at a meeting of the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia that autumn. ~ Bill Bryson

He left to do whatever editors do. ~ Bill Bryson

It seems impossible that you could get something from nothing, but the fact that once there was nothing and now there is a universe is evident proof that you can. ~ Bill Bryson

Vitamin B proved to be not one vitamin but several, which is why we have B1, B2, and so on. To add to the confusion, Vitamin K has nothing to do with an alphabetical sequence. It was called K because its Danish discoverer, Henrik Dam, dubbed it "koagulations viatmin" for its role in blood clotting. ~ Bill Bryson

As I always used to tell Thomas Wolfe, there are three things you just can't do in life. You can't beat the phone company, you can't make a waiter see you until he's ready to see you, and you can't go home again. ~ Bill Bryson

And yet in Britain, despite the constant buffetings of history, English survived. It is a cherishable irony that a language that succeeded almost by stealth, treated for centuries as the inadequate and second-rate tongue of peasants, should one day become the most important and successful language in the world. ~ Bill Bryson

Scheele independently discovered eight elements - chlorine, fluorine, manganese, barium, molybdenum, tungsten, nitrogen, and oxygen - but received credit for none of them in his lifetime. He had an unfortunate habit of tasting every substance he worked with, as a way of familiarizing himself with its properties, and eventually the practice caught up with him. ~ Bill Bryson

Black bears rarely attack. But here's the thing. Sometimes they do. All bears are agile, cunning and immensely strong, and they are always hungry. If they want to kill you and eat you, they can, and pretty much whenever they want. That doesn't happen often, but - and here is the absolutely salient point - once would be enough. ~ Bill Bryson

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

Suddenly we were in Hawaii - tropical mountains running down to sparkling seas, sweeping bays, flawless beaches guarded by listing palms, little green and rocky islands standing off the headlands. From time to time we drove through sunny canefields, overlooked by the steep, blue eminence of the Great Dividing Range. ~ Bill Bryson

They were most peculiar. And they eat pizza pie." "For breakfast?" "No, for lunch and dinner. But it's not a pie at all, it's a kind of bread with tomato sauce and cheese on it." "Sounds dreadful. ~ Bill Bryson

Hitler and Mussolini even went so far as to persecute Esperanto speakers. ~ Bill Bryson

Even so, as was his custom, he writes the name in an abbreviated form: "Wllm Shaksp." It also has a large blot on the end of the surname, probably because of the comparatively low quality of the paper. Though it is only a deposition, it is also the only document in existence containing a transcript of Shakespeare speaking in his own voice. ~ Bill Bryson

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

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

At the time of our hike, the
Appalachian Trail was fifty-nine years old. That is, by American standards, incredibly venerable. The Oregon and Santa Fe trails didn't last as long. Route 66 didn't last as long.
The old coast-to-coast Lincoln Highway, a road that brought transforming wealth and life to hundreds of little towns, so important and familiar that it became known as "America's Main Street," didn't last as long. Nothing in America does. If a product or enterprise doesn't constantly reinvent itself, it is superseded, cast aside, abandoned without sentiment in favor of something bigger, newer, and, alas, nearly always uglier. And then there is the good old AT, still quietly ticking along after six decades, unassuming, splendid, faithful to its founding principles, sweetly unaware that the world has quite moved on. It's a miracle really. ~ Bill Bryson

Edison pressed on and designed a range of concrete furnishings - bureaus, cupboards, chairs, even a concrete piano - to go with his concrete houses. He promised that soon he would offer, for just $5, a double bed that would never wear out. The entire range was to be unveiled at a cement industry show in New York in 1912. In the event, when the show opened, the Edison stand was bare. No one from the Edison company ever offered an explanation. It was the last anyone ever heard of concrete furniture. As far as is known, Edison never discussed the matter. A ~ Bill Bryson

Imagine having a city full of things that no other city had. ~ Bill Bryson

You can't have a more civilized community than one in which hospital staff play cricket at the end of a summer's day and lunatics can wander and mingle without exciting comment or alarm. It was wonderful, possibly unsurpassable. It really was. That was the Britain I came to. I wish it could be that place again. ~ Bill Bryson

It is an interesting experience to become acquainted with a country through the eyes of the insane, and, if I may say so, a particularly useful grounding for life in Britain. ~ Bill Bryson

Our uniqueness alone is enough to justify our special place in the world. But even more, our destiny insists we use our gifts to show others who they really are or show them what, in an ideal world, they could become. It may shock them at first, but deep down, we open their eyes to greater possibilities. ~ Ellen Bryson

Is there anything, apart from a really good chocolate cream pie and receiving a large unexpected cheque in the post, to beat finding yourself at large in a foreign city on a fair spring evening, loafing along unfamiliar streets in the long shadows of a lazy sunset, pausing to gaze in shop windows or at some church or lovely square or tranquil stretch of quayside, hesitating at street corners to decide whether that cheerful and homy restaurant you will remember fondly for years is likely to lie down this street or that one? I just love it. I could spend my life arriving each evening in a new city. ~ Bill Bryson

Even the simplest things had a glorious pointlessness to them. When buttons came in, about 1650, people couldn't get enough of them and arrayed them in decorative profusion on the backs and collars and sleeves of coats, where they didn't actually do anything. One relic of this is the short row of pointless buttons that are still placed on the underside of jacket sleeves near the cuff. These have been purely decorative and have never had a purpose, yet 350 years later on we continue to attach them as if they are the most earnest necessity. ~ Bill Bryson

Hunters will tell you that a moose is a wily and ferocious forest creature. Nonsense. A moose is a cow drawn by a three-year-old. ~ Bill Bryson

Italians are entirely without any commitment to order. They live their lives in a kind of pandemonium, which I find very attractive. ~ Bill Bryson

There is a certain irony in the fact that Britain gave the world nearly all its most important geological names - Devonian, Cambrian, Silurian, Ordovician - but that the one epoch that everybody knows about is named for the Jura Mountains in France, even though the Dorset coast is actually the best place in the world to see Jurassic outcrops. ~ Bill Bryson

One idea to a sentence is still the best advice that anyone has ever given on writing. ~ Bill Bryson

The most celebrated germ expert in the world is almost certainly Dr. Charles P. Gerba of the University of Arizona, who is so devoted to the field that he gave one of his children the middle name Escherichia, after the bacterium Escherichia coli. ~ Bill Bryson

Before, prior to. There is no difference between these two except length and a certain affectedness on the part of 'prior to.' To paraphrase Bernstein, if you would use 'posterior to' instead of 'after,' then by all means use 'prior to' instead of 'before. ~ Bill Bryson

To be fair, 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

As Bill Bryson wrote during the 2000 Olympics in Sydney: 'A lot of people don't like fencing because they don't understand the rules and terminology, but in fact it's quite simple. There are basically four thrusts, known as the cartilage, the chaise lounge, the aubergine, and the fromage anglais, and these in turn can be parried by four defensive feints – the pastiche, the penchant, the demi-tass...e, and the saumon en croute. Scoring is one point for a petit pois and two for a baguette. Points can equally be deducted for a foot fault or pied a terre, or for a type of illegal lunge known as a zut alors. ~ Richard Cohen

I had always thought that once you grew up you could do anything you wanted - stay up all night or eat ice-cream straight out of the container. ~ Bill Bryson

The National Park Service actually has something of a tradition of making things extinct. ~ Bill Bryson

Trends don't mean very much. ~ Peabo Bryson

Perhaps nothing speaks more eloquently of the variability of spelling in the age than the fact that a dictionary published in 1604, A Table Alphabeticall of Hard Words, spelled "words" two ways on the title page. ~ Bill Bryson

Although Penzias and Wilson had not been looking for cosmic background radiation, didn't know what it was when they had found it, and hadn't described or interpreted its character in any paper, they received the 1978 Nobel Prize in physics. The Princeton researchers got only sympathy. According to Dennis Overbye in Lonely Hearts of the Cosmos, neither Penzias nor Wilson altogether understood the significance of what they had found until they read about it in the New York Times. ~ Bill Bryson

You didn't make her sue you, even if you did punch her at that wedding. ~ Kathy Bryson

When even camels can't manage a desert, you know you've found a tough part of the world. ~ Bill Bryson

What would it be like if we had four years and four months to watch an inescapable doom advancing toward us, knowing that when it finally arrived it would blow the skin right off our bones? ~ Bill Bryson

The poet Robert Browning caused considerable consternation by including the word twat in one of his poems, thinking it an innocent term. The work was Pippa Passes, written in 1841 and now remembered for the line "God's in His heaven, all's right with the world." But it also contains this disconcerting passage:
Then owls and bats
Cowls and twats
Monks and nuns in a cloister's moods,
Adjourn to the oak-stump pantry!
Browning had apparently somewhere come across the word twat
which meant precisely the same then as it does now
but pronounced it with a flat a and somehow took it to mean a piece of headgear for nuns. The verse became a source of twittering amusement for generations of schoolboys and a perennial embarrassment to their elders, but the word was never altered and Browning was allowed to live out his life in wholesome ignorance because no one could think of a suitably delicate way of explaining his mistake to him. ~ Bill Bryson

She caught you. Therefore she gets your treasure. ~ Kathy Bryson

Galaxies of the universe are racing away from us, but that they are doing so at a rate that is accelerating. ~ 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