Quotes About Bill Bryson

#1. There is a whole genre of funny travel writers - that's very popular. There's Bill Bryson and people who follow that route and sell travel writing through making people laugh. It's a very difficult group to take. The line between comedy and mockery is sometimes a bit thin.

John Gimlette

#2. What a joy walking is. All the cares of life, all the hopeless, inept fuckwits that God has strewn along the Bill Bryson Highway of Life suddenly seem far away and harmless, and the world becomes tranquil and welcoming and good.

Bill Bryson

#3. I thought Bill Bryson's 'A Short History of Nearly Everything' was remarkable. Managing to be entertaining while still delivering all that hard science was a pretty good trick to pull off.

Mark Haddon

#4. My favorite book is 'A Short History of Nearly Everything' by Bill Bryson.

Steve Aoki

#5. The whole system was based upon getting kids to a certain standard and packing their minds with information so they could go on to a good university ... The great failure in education, much of the time, is a lack of excitement and stimulus.

Bill Bryson

#6. 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

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

Bill Bryson

#8. You can be a scientist and believe in god: the two can go hand in hand.

Bill Bryson

#9. Even though sugar was very expensive, people consumed it till their teeth turned black, and if their teeth didn't turn black naturally, they blackened them artificially to show how wealthy and marvelously self-indulgent they were.

Bill Bryson

#10. 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

#11. Thank you," I said and then abruptly leaned across the counter and with two forked fingers poked him sharply in the eyes. Actually, I didn't do that. I just imagined it. But imagining it made me feel better. I

Bill Bryson

#12. We enjoy not only the privilege of existence, but also the singular ability to appreciate it and even, in a multitude of ways, to make it better.

Bill Bryson

#13. Shakespeare used 17,677 words in his writings, of which at least one-tenth had never been used before. Imagine if every tenth word you wrote were original. It is a staggering display of ingenuity. But

Bill Bryson

#14. I still enjoy traveling a lot. I mean, it amazes me that I still get excited in hotel rooms just to see what kind of shampoo they've left me.

Bill Bryson

#15. Thankfully for us, water seems unaware of the rules of chemistry or laws of physics. Everyone

Bill Bryson

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

Bill Bryson

#17. 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

#18. The Forest Service is truly an extraordinary institution. A lot of people, seeing that word forest in the title, assume it has something to do with looking after trees. In fact, no - though that was the original plan.

Bill Bryson

#19. We may be the living universe's supreme achievement and its worst nightmare simultaneously. Because

Bill Bryson

#20. 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

#21. Simeon Potter notes that when James II first saw St. Paul's Cathedral he called it amusing, awful, and artificial, and meant that it was pleasing to look at, deserving of awe, and full of skillful artifice.

Bill Bryson

#22. The universe is not only queerer than we suppose; it is queerer than we can suppose

Bill Bryson

#23. 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

#24. Most big companies don't like you very much, except hotels, airlines and Microsoft, which don't like you at all.

Bill Bryson

#25. 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

#26. If you believe in god, it's much more fantastic to believe that he created this universe billions of years ago and set in motion this long train of activities that eventually resulted in us. I think that's so much more satisfying, more thrilling, than the idea that it was all done in seven days.

Bill Bryson

#27. James Croll, the Scottish janitor and self-taught polymath whose theories concerning Earth's orbit provided the first plausible explanation for how ice ages might have started.

Bill Bryson

#28. In America, Benjamin Franklin famously risked his life by flying a kite in an electrical storm.

Bill Bryson

#29. I didn't ask for twenty quarter-pound cheeseburgers, I asked for four quarter-pound cheeseburgers five times." "Same thing," he said. "It's not the same thing at all. You can't be this stupid." Two

Bill Bryson

#30. What sets the carbon atom apart is that it is shamelessly promiscuous.

Bill Bryson

#31. Life just wants to be; but it doesn't want to be much.

Bill Bryson

#32. In the United States, frozen cheese pizza is regulated by the Food and Drug Administration. Frozen pepperoni pizza, on the other hand, is regulated by the Department of Agriculture.

Bill Bryson

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

Bill Bryson

#34. How do migrating birds know which one to follow? What if the lead bird just wants to be alone?

Bill Bryson

#35. In terms of adaptability, humans are pretty amazingly useless.

Bill Bryson

#36. 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

#37. 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

#38. A cough so robust that I tapped into two new seams of phlegm.

Bill Bryson

#39. 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

#40. 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

#41. 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

#42. I grew up, really, in the days before air conditioning. So I can remember what it was like to be really hot, for instance, and I can remember what it was like when your barber shop and your local stores weren't air conditioned, so it was hot when you went in them and they propped the doors open.

Bill Bryson

#43. The red shift gives the speed at which galaxies are retiring, but doesn't tell us how far away they are to begin with.

Bill Bryson

#44. The most elusive element of all, however, appears to be francium28, which is so rare that it is thought that our entire planet may contain, at any given moment, fewer than twenty francium atoms.

Bill Bryson

#45. London isn't a place at all. It's a million little places.

Bill Bryson

#46. When we peer into the distance some of the galaxies we see may simply be reflections, ghost images created by rebounded light.

Bill Bryson

#47. So what is your star sign?' Said Mary Ellen 'Cunnilingus' Katz answered looking profoundly unhappy.

Bill Bryson

#48. 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

#49. 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

#50. (his house at Stowe, in Buckinghamshire, had nine of the first flush toilets in England),

Bill Bryson

#51. Daniel Boone, who not only wrestled bears but tried to date their sisters, described corners of the southern Appalachians as so wild and horrid that it is impossible to behold them without terror.

Bill Bryson

#52. I had spent the whole of my savings ... on a suit for the wedding - a remarkable piece of apparel with lapels that had been modelled on the tail fins of a 1957 Coupe de Ville and trousers so copiously flared that when I walked you didn't see my legs move.

Bill Bryson

#53. Experimentation without mathematical explanation is blind; mathematical explanation without experimentation is empty.

Bill Bryson

#54. There's something satisfying, I think,' Evans said, 'about the idea of light travelling for millions of years through space and just at the right moment as it reaches Earth someone looks at the right bit of sky and sees it. It just seems right that an event of that magnitude should be witnessed.

Bill Bryson

#55. I come from Des Moines. Somebody had to.

Bill Bryson

#56. Because time moves more slowly in Kid World ... it goes on for decades ... It is adult life that is over in a twinkling.

Bill Bryson

#57. I don't know whether I'm misanthropic. It seems to me I'm constantly disappointed. I'm very easily disappointed. Disappointed in the things that people do; disappointed in the things that people construct. I want things to be better all the time.

Bill Bryson

#58. In Australia and the Americas," says Tim Flannery, "the animals probably didn't know enough to run away.

Bill Bryson

#59. When you sit in a chair, you are not actually sitting there, but levitating above it at a height of one angstrom (a hundred millionth of a centimetre), your electrons and its electrons implacably opposed to any closer intimacy.

Bill Bryson

#60. Bayes's theorem and that looks like this: People who understand Bayes's theorem can use it to work out complex problems involving probability distributions - or inverse probabilities, as they are sometimes called.

Bill Bryson

#61. A year in Vermont, according to an old saw, is nine months of winter followed by three months of very poor sledding.

Bill Bryson

#62. one cannot "predict future events exactly if one cannot even measure the present state of the universe precisely!

Bill Bryson

#63. The one word that Newfoundland has given the world is penguin. No one has any idea what inspired it.

Bill Bryson

#64. Of the total surface area of Earth, Britain occupies just 0.0174069 per cent.

Bill Bryson

#65. As my father always used to tell me, 'You see, son, there's always someone in the world worse off than you.' And I always used to think, 'So?

Bill Bryson

#66. Still, I never really mind bad service in a restaurant. It makes me feel better about not leaving a tip.

Bill Bryson

#67. All over the inchoate solar system, the same was happening. Colliding dust grains formed larger and larger clumps. Eventually the clumps grew large enough to be called planetesimals.

Bill Bryson

#68. Making English grammar conform to Latin rules is like asking people to play baseball using the rules of football.

Bill Bryson

#69. Taking a scenic route in Southeast Iowa is like talking about a good Barry Manilow album. You have to make certain allowances.

Bill Bryson

#70. Without local newspapers there's no one to tell you when somebody's been fined for having rats in their kitchens.

Bill Bryson

#71. John A. Templer of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, author of the definitive (and, it must be said, almost only) scholarly text on the subject, The Staircase: Studies of Hazards, Falls, and Safer Design, suggests that all fall-injury figures are probably severely underestimated anyway.

Bill Bryson

#72. 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

#73. In fact, overwhelmingly museum displays are artificial.

Bill Bryson

#74. Shenandoah National Park is lovely. It is possibly the most wonderful national park I have ever been in, and, considering the impossible and conflicting demands put on it, it is extremely well run. Almost at once it became my favorite part of the Appalachian Trail.

Bill Bryson

#75. 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

#76. England?" she said with unreserved amazement. "Why do you live in England?" "Because it is nothing like Indianapolis

Bill Bryson

#77. How stupid of me not to have thought of it! T. H. Huxley cried upon reading On the Origin of Species. It is a view that has been echoed ever since. Interestingly,

Bill Bryson

#78. As the saying goes, it takes all kinds to make the world go around, though perhaps some shouldn't go quite so far around it as others.

Bill Bryson

#79. The first book I did - the first successful book - was a kind of a travel book, and publishers in Britain encouraged me to do more.

Bill Bryson

#80. Bundesbahnangestelltenwitwe (a widow of a federal railway employee),

Bill Bryson

#81. Protons give an atom its identity, electrons its personality.

Bill Bryson

#82. We forget just how painfully dim the world was before electricity. A candle, a good candle, provides barely a hundredth of the illumination of a single 100 watt light bulb.

Bill Bryson

#83. It's hard not to be kind of pessimistic about human beings generally, because we do tend to mess things up. If you just look at the history of extinctions, we've killed off an awful lot of animals - and I don't think we're doing a very good job of looking after the planet.

Bill Bryson

#84. The famous jack-o-lantern mushroom, which glows at night with a greenish phosphorescent ligh called foxfire.

Bill Bryson

#85. There was so much unrecognized novelty in the collection that at one point18 upon opening a new drawer Conway Morris famously was heard to mutter, 'Oh fuck, not another phylum.' The

Bill Bryson

#86. 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

#87. Sometimes it rained, but mostly it was just dull, a land without shadows. It was like living inside Tupperware.

Bill Bryson

#88. I ended up with enough equipment to bring full employment to a vale of sherpas -

Bill Bryson

#89. I can wear a baseball cap; I am entitled to wear a baseball cap. I am genetically pre-disposed to wear a baseball cap, whereas most English people look wrong in a baseball cap.

Bill Bryson

#90. In a funny way, nothing makes you feel more like a native of your own country than to live where nearly everyone is not.

Bill Bryson

#91. 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

#92. I like to do books in which a lot of the research and the writing and the thinking revolves around something American.

Bill Bryson

#93. Jefferson, incidentally, was also a great adventurer with foods. Among his many other accomplishments, he was the first person in America to slice potatoes lengthwise and fry them. So as well as being the author of the Declaration of Independence, he was also the father of the American French fry.

Bill Bryson

#94. Buffon found himself threatened with excommunication for expressing it. A practical man, he apologized at once for his thoughtless heresy, then cheerfully repeated the assertions throughout his subsequent writings.

Bill Bryson

#95. In office buildings and retail premises in which entry is through double doors and one of those doors is locked for no reason, the door must bear a large sign saying: This Door Is Locked for No Reason.

Bill Bryson

#96. 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

#97. They are, reluctantly or enthusiastically, accepting the idea that humans are as much an accident of nature as a product of orderly development. But

Bill Bryson

#98. There is more difference between a zebra and a horse, or between a dolphin and a porpoise, than there is between you and the furry creatures your distant ancestors left behind when they set out to take over the world.

Bill Bryson

#99. 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

#100. In answer to the question of why it happened, I offer the modest proposal that our Universe is simply one of those things which happen from time to time.

Bill Bryson