Bill Bryson quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Bill Bryson

Bill Bryson Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Bill Bryson on Wise Famous Quotes.

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

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

Polysemy, and it is very common. Sound is another polysemic word.

Henry Ford had the additional distinction of being the only American mentioned favorably in Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler's memoir of 1925.

Looked at from above, west London isn't so much a city as a forest with buildings.

We're going to be in the wilderness in three days. There won't be doughnut stores.

For us, the universe goes only as far as light has travelled in the billions of years since the universe was formed.

while - for a couple of minutes - it's actually

At one time he [Cornelius Vanderbilt] personally controlled some 10 percent of all the money in circulation in the United States.

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.

Protons give an atom its identity, electrons its personality.

If there's one thing the AT teaches, it is low-level ecstasy - something we could all do with more of in our lives.

I want things to be better all the time. And I tend to get angry about that. Books are an opportunity to vent.

A world without newspapers or a world where the newspapers are purely electronic and you read them on a screen is not a very appealing world.

As the biologist J. B. S. Haldane once famously observed: "The universe is not only queerer than we suppose; it is queerer than we can suppose." The

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

At all events, rather less is known about Lucy than is generally supposed. It isn't even actually known that she was a female.

It is remarkable to think that we have had electric lights and telephones for about as long as we have known that germs kill people.

Lots of people leave Pennsylvania limping and bruised. The state also has what are reputed to be the meanest rattlesnakes anywhere along the trail,

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?

The romance of travel wasn't always terribly evident to those who were actually experiencing it.

Jesus, I smell like Jeffrey Dahmer's refrigerator.

Bundesbahnangestelltenwitwe (a widow of a federal railway employee),

It occurred to me that Australians are so surrounded with danger that they have evolved an entirely new vocabulary to deal with it.

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

The current best estimate for the Earth's weight is 5.9725 billion trillion tonnes,

Life emerged so swiftly, in fact, that some authorities think it must have had help - perhaps a good deal of help.

paradise for people who look as if they have just stepped out of a Barbour catalogue.

I can't fix the world. If you want to make a difference in life, you have to direct your energies in a focused way.

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

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.

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

Among the tiny atomic structures the plankton take to the grave with them are two very stable isotopes - oxygen-16 and oxygen-18.

Somehow, from this Gilbert concluded that the Moon's craters were indeed formed by impacts - in itself quite a radical notion for the time - but

As the economist Herman Daly once put it: The current national accounting system treats the earth as a business in liquidation.

satisfyingly dizzying

In nearly every year for at least 250 years, deaths outnumbered births in London.

I'm definitely an American, because I grew up here. But I've lived very happily in Britain.

I would sooner have bowel surgery in the woods with a stick.

Lucy constituted only 28 per cent of a half skeleton (and only about 20 per cent of a full one).

Nearly 250 daily newspapers folded in the decade after the birth of network radio.

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

Even in walking across the room you will very slightly alter your own experience of time and space.

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

You are totally at the mercy of nature in this country, mate. It's just a fact of life.

Most of what has lived on Earth has left behind no record at all.

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

Thoreau was an idiot.

Percy Bysshe (the only poet named for the sound of a match hitting water),

In fact, overwhelmingly museum displays are artificial.

The great failure in education, much of the time, is the lack of excitement and stimulus

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

Loony hillbillies destabilized by gross quantities of impure corn liquor and generations of profoundly unbiblical sex;

Noting the lack of crime or security in the Netherlands, the author asked a native who guarded a national landmark. He got the replay, We all do.

I'm a great believer that you had to do everything you've done to have got to where you are.

Peale was a lover of birds, and yet did not hesitate to kill them in large numbers for no better reason than that it interested him to do so.

there. I had thought we would have

radiocarbon dating works only for objects up to forty thousand or so years old. Curiously,

That's the trouble with losing your mind; by the time it's gone, it's too late to get it back.

I really enjoy going to a library and spending the day doing research - to me that is the most pleasurable part of writing the science book.

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

We were idiots really, but awfully happy, too.

The favourite activity is drinking a lot of beer and the second is throwing it up again)

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

He was taken to St. Lawrence Hospital and died the next day. He never regained consciousness.

In short, the remarkable position in which we find ourselves is that we don't actually know what we actually know. In

It occurred to me, not for the first time, that if Britain is ever to sort itself out, it is going to require a lot of euthanasia.

I suppose all our lives must be at the end of a long chain of improbable coincidences,

MACHOs (for MAssive Compact Halo Objects - really just another name for black holes, brown dwarfs and other very dim stars).

It is unthinkable to have a British countryside that doesn't have actual functioning farmers riding tractors, cows in fields, things like that.

He called it a mastodon (which means, a touch unexpectedly, "nipple-teeth").

Report in The Economist as much as 97 per cent of the world's plant and animal species may still await discovery. Of

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

Every day in every way I am getting better and better.*

Every living thing, never forget, is a wonder of atomic engineering. Indeed,

The older you get the more it seems the world belongs to other people.

I see litter as part of a long continuum of anti-social behaviour.

There is only one place, an inconspicuous outpost of the Milky Way called the Earth, that will sustain you, and even it can be pretty grudging. From

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

his facetious grace in writing," and much else.

The average asteroid actually will be about one and a half million kilometres from its nearest neighbour.

DNA is, as it were, especially unalive. It is among the most nonreactive, chemically inert molecules in the living world,

Far from marking the outer edge of the solar system, as those schoolroom maps so cavalierly imply, Pluto is barely one-fifty-thousandth of the way.

Geologists are never at a loss for paperweights.

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

Ocean vents harbour some of the most extraordinary life on the planet.

This wouldn't be so bad, I told myself. But secretly, I knew that I was quite wrong.

To me that was just a miracle. That has been my position with science ever since. Excited,

More than 300 million people in the world speak English and the rest, it sometimes seems, try to.

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

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

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

In three minutes, 98 percent of all the matter there is or will ever be has been produced. We have a universe

journal Science in 1980 contending that women are genetically inferior at mathematics.

Scientists tend to be unappreciated in the world at large, but you can hardly overstate the importance of the work they do.

It was so bad, it was worth more than we paid.

In 1906 he and Hulda made the first of several trips to London to sift through the records.

I love a sunburnt country, A land of sweeping plains, Of ragged mountain ranges, Of droughts and flooding rains.

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

Wallace, King and Sanders point out in Biology: The Science of Life (that rarest thing: a readable textbook),