Bill Bryson Quotes

It seems impossible that you could get something from nothing, but the fact that once there was noth...

She was torn between her customer service training and her youthful certitude.

Perhaps it’s my natural pessimism, but it seems that an awfully large part of travel these days is t...

…a waitress came out and plonked in front of each of us a small standard terra-cotta flowerpot in wh...

He left to do whatever editors do.

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

[About Uluru] I'm suggesting nothing here, but I will say that if you were an intergalactic traveler...

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

Describing his experience with the sting of an extremely toxic jellyfish, he did something you don't...

From that original colony sprang seven names that still feature on the landscape: Roanoke (which has...

Because of social strictures against even the mildest swearing, America developed a particularly ric...

Just a month after the completion of the Declaration of Independence, at a time when he delegates mi...

By the 1920s if you wanted to work behind a lunch counter you needed to know that 'Noah's boy' was a...

Considerable thought was given in early Congresses to the possibility of renaming the country. From ...

What is it about maps? I could look at them all day, earnestly studying the names of towns and villa...

I sat on a toilet watching the water run thinking what an odd thing tourism is. You fly off to a str...

She would only make me take my seat if I didn't act calm and Swiss about it all.

Noting the lack of crime or security in the Netherlands, the author asked a native who guarded a nat...

But that's the glory of foreign travel, as far as I am concerned. I don't want to know what people a...

Bulgaria, I reflected as I walked back to the hotel, isn’t a country; it’s a near-death experience.

This was 1990 the year that communism died in Europe and it seemed strange to me that in all the wor...

I know this goes without saying, but Stonehenge really was the most incredible accomplishment. It to...

By the time I had finished my coffee and returned to the streets, the rain had temporarily abated, b...

Tunney has all the makings of a hero – he was clean living, intelligent, polite, reasonably good-loo...

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

It was a lot more fun to get famous than to be famous.

And there was never a better time to delve for pleasure in language than the sixteenth century, when...

(...)we all recognize a likeness of Shakespeare the instant we see one, and yet we don’t really know...

A third...candidate for Shakespearean authorship was Christopher Marlowe. He was the right age (just...

Shakespeare 'never owned a book,' a writer for the New York Times gravely informed readers in one do...

They talk about big skies in the western United States, and they may indeed have them, but you have ...

I used to give X-ray vision a lot of thought because I couldn’t see how it could work. I mean, if yo...

It was an odd situation. For a century and a half, men got rid of their own hair, which was perfectl...

America's industrial success produced a roll call of financial magnificence: Rockefellers, Morgans, ...

The author reveals a cultural change that took place when clergy were paid based on a tax on the lan...

Perhaps the most irrational fashion act of all was the male habit for 150 years of wearing wigs. Sam...

For anyone of a rational disposition, fashion is often nearly impossible to fathom. Throughout many ...

In the mystifying world that was Victorian parenthood, obedience took precedence over all considerat...

I refer of course to the soaring wonder of the age known as the Eiffel Tower. Never in history has a...

Whatever happens in the world - whatever is discovered or created or bitterly fought over - eventual...

Pantaloons were often worn tight as paint and were not a great deal less revealing, particularly as ...

Nothing - really, absolutely nothing - says more about Victorian Britain and its capacity for brilli...

It is always quietly thrilling to find yourself looking at a world you know well but have never seen...

If a potato can produce vitamin C, why can't we? Within the animal kingdom only humans and guinea pi...

It is not as if farming brought a great improvement in living standards either. A typical hunter-gat...

Victorian rigidities were such that ladies were not even allowed to blow out candles in mixed compan...

The thing about Ayers Rock is that by the time you finally get there you are already a little sick o...

Consider the Lichen. Lichens are just about the hardiest visible organisms on Earth, but the least a...

The universe is an amazingly fickle and eventful place, and our existence within is a wonder.

Our instinct may be to see the impossibility of tracking everything down as frustrating, dispiriting...

One consequential change is that people used to get most of their calories at breakfast and midday, ...

In America, alas, beauty has become something you drive to, and nature an either/or proposition--eit...

There are three stages in scientific discovery. First, people deny that it is true, then they deny t...

This is a world where things move at their own pace, including a tiny lift Fortey and I shared with ...

In terms of adaptability, humans are pretty amazingly useless.

Imagine trying to live in a world dominated by dihydrogen oxide, a compound that has no taste or sme...

Tune your television to any channel it doesn't receive and about 1 percent of the dancing static you...

As humans we are inclined to feel that life must have a point. We have plans and aspirations and des...

Physics is really nothing more than a search for ultimate simplicity, but so far all we have is a ki...

It is easy to overlook this thought that life just is. As humans we are inclined to feel that life m...

It is a slightly arresting notion that if you were to pick yourself apart with tweezers, one atom at...

Energy is liberated matter, matter is energy waiting to happen.

On a cooler sun on a primordial earth: "I later learned that biologists, when they are feeling jocos...

If this book has a lesson, it is that we are awfully lucky to be here-and by 'we' I mean every livin...

Thoreau was an idiot.

I suppose because I grew up a thousand miles from the sea and missed the great age of passenger line...

There'd never been a more advantageous time to be a criminal in America than during the 13 years of ...

If you drive to, say, Shenandoah National Park, or the Great Smoky Mountains, you'll get some apprec...

An awful lot of England is slowly eroding, in ways that I find really distressing, and an awful lot ...

Roads get wider and busier and less friendly to pedestrians. And all of the development based around...

It was the kind of pure, undiffused light that can only come from a really hot blue sky, the kind th...

Every atom you possess has almost certainly passed through several stars and been part of millions o...

Presumably, a confused person would be too addled to recognize that he was confused. Ergo, if you kn...

The little town of Dayton - not far from where Katz and I now sat, as it happened - was the scene of...

The question that naturally occurs is “What would it be like if a star exploded nearby?” Our nearest...

Even the simplest things had a glorious pointlessness to them. When buttons came in, about 1650, peo...

It may not look it, but all the glass on Earth is flowing downwards under the relentless drag of gra...

Just because a word or expression has an antiquity or was once widely used does not confer on it som...

I love to watch cities wake up, and Paris wakes up more abruptly, more startlingly, than any place I...

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

It's an unnerving thought that we may be the living universe's supreme achievement and its worst nig...

The current best estimate for the Earth’s weight is 5.9725 billion trillion tonnes, a difference of ...

Not only have you been lucky enough to be attached since time immemorial to a favored evolutionary l...

To my mind, the greatest reward and luxury of travel is to be able to experience everyday things as ...

You don't need a science degree to understand about science. You just need to think about it.

The first book I did - the first successful book - was a kind of a travel book, and publishers in Br...

All the things that are part of your heritage make you British - that makes this country what it is....

Open your refrigerator door, and you summon forth more light than the total amount enjoyed by most h...

I ordered a coffee and a little something to eat and savored the warmth and dryness. Somewhere in th...

We forget just how painfully dim the world was before electricity. A candle, a good candle, provides...

Mr. Schlubb, the pear-shaped PE teacher, sent us all out to run half a dozen laps around a preposter...

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

I come from Des Moines. Somebody had to.

They were Republicans, Nixon Republicans, and so didn't subscribe to the notion that laws are suppos...

It’s a bit burned,” my mother would say apologetically at every meal, presenting you with a piece of...

In my day the principal concerns of university students were sex, smoking dope, rioting and learning...

And now here I was in McDonald's again for the first time since my earlier fracas. I vowed to behave...

[Traveling] makes you realize what an immeasurably nice place much of America could be if only peopl...

The youth of Idaho falls should be encouraged to take drugs in order to cope up with the fact that t...

As my father always used to tell me, 'You see, son, there's always someone in the world worse off th...

I became quietly seized with that nostalgia that overcomes you when you have reached the middle of y...