Bill Bryson famous quotes

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

#Mind #Too Late #Gone

For anyone of a rational disposition, fashion is often nearly impossible to fathom. Throughout many periods of history – perhaps most – it can seem as if the whole impulse of fashion has been to look maximally ridiculous. If one could be maximally uncomfortable as well, the triumph was all the greater.
-- Bill Bryson

#Fashion #Triumph #Looks

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

#Oats #Firsts #Earth

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

#Luck #Together #Alive

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

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

#People #Trying #World

I ordered a coffee and a little something to eat and savored the warmth and dryness. Somewhere in the background Nat King Cole sang a perky tune. I watched the rain beat down on the road outside and told myself that one day this would be twenty years ago.
-- Bill Bryson

#Kings #Rain #Coffee

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

#Light #Illumination #World

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

#Real #World #Good Advice

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

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

It was an odd situation. For a century and a half, men got rid of their own hair, which was perfectly comfortable, and instead covered their heads with something foreign and uncomfortable. Very often it was actually their own hair made into a wig. People who couldn't afford wigs tried to make their hair look like a wig.
-- Bill Bryson

#Men #Hair #People

But that's the glory of foreign travel, as far as I am concerned. I don't want to know what people are talking about. 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. Suddenly you are five years old again. You can't read anything, you have only the most rudimentary sense of how things work, you can't even reliably cross a street without endangering your life. Your whole existence becomes a series of interesting guesses.
-- Bill Bryson

#Country #Travel #Memorable

We used to build civilizations. Now we build shopping malls.
-- Bill Bryson

#Badass #Bad Ass #Civilization

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

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

There are three stages in scientific discovery. First, people deny that it is true, then they deny that it is important; finally they credit the wrong person.
-- Bill Bryson

#Discovery #People #Important

I wanted to quit and to do this forever, sleep in a bed and in a tent, see what was over the next hill and never see a hill again. All of this all at once, every moment, on the trail or off.
-- Bill Bryson

#Sleep #Forever #Bed

The tearoom lady called me love. All the shop ladies called me love and most of the men called me mate. I hadn't been here twelve hours and already they loved me.
-- Bill Bryson

#Men #Twelve #Hours

... 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

Your pillow alone may be home to 40 million bed mites. (To them your head is just one large oily bon-bon). And don't think a clean pillow-case will make a difference... Indeed, if your pillow is six years old--which is apparently about the average age for a pillow--it has been estimated that one-tenth of its weight will be made up of sloughed skin, living mites, dead mites and mite dung.
-- Bill Bryson

#Home #Thinking #Average

If this book has a lesson, it is that we are awfully lucky to be here-and by 'we' I mean every living thing. To attain any kind of life in this universe of ours appears to be quite an achievement. As humans we are doubly lucky, of course: 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. It is a talent we have only barely begun to grasp.
-- Bill Bryson

#Book #Mean #Appreciate

As James Surowiecki noted in a New Yorker article, given a choice between developing antibiotics that people will take every day for two weeks and antidepressants that people will take every day for ever, drug companies not surprisingly opt for the latter. Although a few antibiotics have been toughened up a bit, the pharmaceutical industry hasn't given us an entirely new antibiotic since the 1970s.
-- Bill Bryson

#Two #People #Choices

If a potato can produce vitamin C, why can't we? Within the animal kingdom only humans and guinea pigs are unable to synthesize vitamin C in their own bodies. Why us and guinea pigs? No point asking. Nobody knows.
-- Bill Bryson

#Animal #Pigs #Asking

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

The number of people on whose cooperative efforts your eventual existence depends has risen to approximately 1,000,000,000,000,000,000, which is several thousand times the total number of people who have ever lived.
-- Bill Bryson

#Numbers #People #Effort

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

#Food #Thinking #Numbers

The upshot of all this is that we live in a universe whose age we can't quite compute, surrounded by stars whose distances we don't altogether know, filled with matter we can't identify, operating in conformance with physical laws whose properties we don’t truly understand.
-- Bill Bryson

#Stars #Distance #Law

I sat on a toilet watching the water run thinking what an odd thing tourism is. You fly off to a strange land, eagerly abandoning all the comforts of home and then expend vast quantities of time and money in a largely futile effort to recapture the comforts you wouldn’t have lost if you hadn’t left home in the first place.
-- Bill Bryson

#Running #Travel #Home

There are 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

#Home #Phones #House

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

#Baseball #Football #Latin

There is always a little more toothpaste in the tube. Think about it.
-- Bill Bryson

#Thinking #Littles #Toothpaste

Four times I was honked at for having the temerity to proceed through town without the benefit of metal.
-- Bill Bryson

#Benefits #Four #Towns

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 #Shining

There are only three things that can kill a farmer: lightning, rolling over in a tractor, and old age.
-- Bill Bryson

#Age #Lightning #Rolling

English grammar is so complex and confusing for the one very simple reason that its rules and terminology are based on Latin, a language with which it has precious little in common.
-- Bill Bryson

#Latin #Simple #Confusing

Language is more fashion than science, and matters of usage, spelling and pronunciation tend to wander around like hemlines.
-- Bill Bryson

#Fashion #Writing #Matter

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

To my mind, the greatest reward and luxury of travel is to be able to experience everyday things as if for the first time, to be in a position in which almost nothing is so familiar it is taken for granted.
-- Bill Bryson

#Travel #Taken #Luxury

I could spend my life arriving each evening in a new city.
-- Bill Bryson

#Travel #Cities #Arriving

In terms of adaptability, humans are pretty amazingly useless.
-- Bill Bryson

#Useless #Adaptability #Term

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

#Records #Earth #Left Behind

Every atom you possess has almost certainly passed through several stars and been part of millions of organisms on its way to becoming you. We are each so atomically numberous and so vigorously recycled at death that a significant number of our atoms-up to a billion for each of us, it has been suggested-probably once belonged to Shakespeare. A billion more each came from Buddha and Genghis Khan and Beethoven, and any other historical figure you care to name.
-- Bill Bryson

#Stars #Names #Numbers

Energy is liberated matter, matter is energy waiting to happen.
-- Bill Bryson

#Waiting #Energy #Matter

The average Southerner has the speech patterns of someone slipping in and out of consciousness. I can change my shoes and socks faster than most people in Mississippi can speak a sentence.
-- Bill Bryson

#Average #Shoes #People

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, a dynamic hub of wealth and education, where people wear three-piece suits and dark socks, often simultaneously.
-- Bill Bryson

#Growing Up #Dark #Thinking

The best that can be said for Norwegian television is that it gives you the sensation of a coma without the worry and inconvenience.
-- Bill Bryson

#Giving #Worry #Television