Bill Bryson Quotes - Page 3

Quotes about:

• You may not feel outstandingly robust, but if you are an average-sized adult you will contain within your modest frame no less than 7 X 10^18 joules of potential energy—enough to explode with the force of thirty very large hydrogen bombs, assuming you knew how to liberate it and really wished to make a point.

  Bill Bryson

  Average, Hydrogen Bomb, Energy

  10 Copy quote

• No one knows, incidentally, why Australia's spiders are so extravagantly toxic; capturing small insects and injecting them with enough poison to drop a horse would appear to be the most literal case of overkill. Still, it does mean that everyone gives them lots of space.

  Bill Bryson

  Horse, Mean, Australia

  Bill Bryson (2001). “In a Sunburned Country”, Broadway

  9 Copy quote

• South Dakota... is like the world's first drive-through sensory deprivation chamber.

  Bill Bryson

  World, Firsts, Deprivation

  7 Copy quote

• 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

  Simplicity, Kind, Physics

  Bill Bryson (2014). “A Short History of Nearly Everything”, p.154, Lulu Press, Inc

  28 Copy quote

• 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

  Science, Flames, Eyebrows

  Bill Bryson (2014). “A Short History of Nearly Everything”, p.60, Lulu Press, Inc

  14 Copy quote

• It was one of those sumptuous days when the world is full of autumn muskiness and tangy, crisp perfection: vivid blue sky, deep green fields, leaves in a thousand luminous hues. It is a truly astounding sight when every tree in a landscape becomes individual, when each winding back highway and plump hillside is suddenly and infinitely splashed with every sharp shade that nature can bestow - flaming scarlet, lustrous gold, throbbing vermilion, fiery orange.

  Bill Bryson

  Autumn, Green Fields, Sight

  FaceBook post by Bill Bryson from Sep 27, 2015

  8 Copy quote

• Why is it, I wondered, that old people are always so self-centered and excitable? But I just smiled benignly and stood back, comforted by the thought that soon they would be dead.

  Bill Bryson

  Self, People, Would Be

  Bill Bryson (1989). “The Lost Continent: Travels in Small-town America”, p.75, VNR AG

  19 Copy quote

• In the morning I awoke early and experienced that sinking sensation that overcomes you when you first open your eyes and realize that instead of a normal day ahead of you, with its scatterings of simple gratifications, you are going to have a day without even the tiniest of pleasures; you are going to drive across Ohio.

  Bill Bryson

  Morning, Eye, Simple

  5 Copy quote

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

  Bill Bryson

  Baseball, Football, Latin

  15 Copy quote

• We are so used to the notion of our own inevitability as life's dominant species that it is hard to grasp that we are here only because of timely extraterrestrial bangs and other random flukes. The one thing we have in common with all other living things is that for nearly four billions years our ancestors have managed to slip through a series of closing doors every time we needed them to.

  Bill Bryson

  Doors, Years, Four

  Bill Bryson (2014). “A Short History of Nearly Everything”, p.319, Lulu Press, Inc

  7 Copy quote

• You can always tell a Midwestern couple in Europe because they will be standing on a traffic island in the middle of a busy intersection looking at a windblown map and arguing over which way is west. European cities, with their wandering streets and undisciplined alleys, drive Midwesterners practically insane.

  Bill Bryson

  Couple, Cities, Islands

  Bill Bryson (1989). “The Lost Continent: Travels in Small-town America”, p.15, VNR AG

  9 Copy quote

• 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

  Inspirational, Funny, Country

  FaceBook post by Bill Bryson from Sep 01, 2012

  87 Copy quote

• Traveling is more fun - hell, life is more fun - if you can treat it as a series of impulses.

  Bill Bryson

  Fun, Life Is, Hell

  5 Copy quote

• 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

  Fashion, Moving, Pieces

  Bill Bryson (1991). “Neither here nor there: travels in Europe”, Harvill Secker

  6 Copy quote

• 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

  Coffee, Beer, Cities

  Bill Bryson (2001). “In a Sunburned Country”, Broadway

  26 Copy quote

• He had the sort of face that makes you realize God does have a sense of humor.

  Bill Bryson

  Doe, Faces, Sense Of Humor

  5 Copy quote

• So, if people didn’t settle down to take up farming, why then did they embark on this entirely new way of living? We have no idea – or actually, we have lots of ideas, but we don’t know if any of them are right. According to Felipe Fernández-Armesto, at least thirty-eight theories have been put forward to explain why people took to living in communities: that they were driven to it by climatic change, or by a wish to stay near their dead, or by a powerful desire to brew and drink beer, which could only be indulged by staying in one place.

  Bill Bryson

  Powerful, Beer, Eight

  10 Copy quote

• Every living thing is an elaboration of a single original plan. As humans we are mere increments - each of us a musty archive of adjustments, adaptations, modifications and providential tinkerings stretching back to 3,8 billion years. Remarkably we are even quite closely related to fruit and vegetables. About half the chemical functions that take place in a banana are fundamentally the same as the chemical functions that place in you. It cannot be said too often: all life is one. That is, and I suspect will ever prove to be, the most profound true statement there is.

  Bill Bryson

  Years, Vegetables, Profound

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• ... it occurred to me that never again would he be seven years, one month and six days old, so we had better catch these moments while we can.

  Bill Bryson

  Years, Months, Six

  Bill Bryson (2000). “The Complete Notes”, Random House

  6 Copy quote

• 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

  Mean, Practice, Worry

  Bill Bryson (2000). “The Complete Notes”, Random House

  5 Copy quote

• 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

  Travel, Memorable, Pessimism

  Bill Bryson (2001). “In a Sunburned Country”, Broadway

  10 Copy quote

• It is a slightly arresting notion that if you were to pick yourself apart with tweezers, one atom at a time, you would produce a mound of fine atomic dust, none of which had ever been alive but all of which had once been you.

  Bill Bryson

  Life, Science, Dust

  Bill Bryson (2014). “A Short History of Nearly Everything”, p.3, Lulu Press, Inc

  7 Copy quote

• My favourite fellow of the Royal Society is the Reverend Thomas Bayes, an obscure 18th-century Kent clergyman and a brilliant mathematician who devised a complex equation known as the Bayes theorem, which can be used to work out probability distributions. It had no practical application in his lifetime, but today, thanks to computers, is routinely used in the modelling of climate change, astrophysics and stock-market analysis.

  Bill Bryson

  Science, Work Out, Royal

  9 Copy quote

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

  Bill Bryson

  Feel Better, Leaving, Mind

  9 Copy quote

• 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

  Men, Ideas, Sound

  67 Copy quote

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