Bill Bryson (Writer)

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 pain

There'd never been a more advantageous time to be a criminal in America than during the 13 years of Prohibition. At a stroke, the American government closed down the fifth largest industry in the United States - alcohol production - and just handed it to criminals - a pretty remarkable thing to do.

— Bill Bryson time

In the countryside, litter doesn't have a friend. It doesn't have anybody who's saying, 'Wait a minute, this is really starting to get out of control.'

— Bill Bryson art

If you drive to, say, Shenandoah National Park, or the Great Smoky Mountains, you'll get some appreciation for the scale and beauty of the outdoors. When you walk into it, then you see it in a completely different way. You discover it in a much slower, more majestic sort of way.

— Bill Bryson beauty

Boston's freeway system is insane. It was clearly designed by a person who had spent his childhood crashing toy trains.

— Bill Bryson childhood

I have long known that it is part of God's plan for me to spend a little time with each of the most stupid people on earth.

— Bill Bryson time

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

— Bill Bryson art

You don't have to know anything about baseball to respond to Babe Ruth because he's just this magnificent human being. And a really good story because he was this kid who grew up essentially as an orphan, you know, had a tough life, and then he became the most successful baseball player ever. But he was also a really good guy.

— Bill Bryson life

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

— Bill Bryson light

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

— Bill Bryson believe

Roads get wider and busier and less friendly to pedestrians. And all of the development based around cars, like big sprawling shopping malls. Everything seems to be designed for the benefit of the automobile and not the benefit of the human being.

— Bill Bryson men

Coming back to your native land after an absence of many years is a surprisingly unsettling business, a little like waking from a long coma. Time, you discover, has wrought changes that leave you feeling mildly foolish and out of touch.

— Bill Bryson change

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 life

I had always thought that once you grew up you could do anything you wanted - stay up all night or eat ice-cream straight out of the container.

— Bill Bryson thought

The remarkable position in which we find ourselves is that we don't actually know what we actually know.

— Bill Bryson

America is a great disappointment to me. As I said in one of my books, other societies create civilisations; we build shopping malls.

— Bill Bryson books

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 funny

I don't know whether I'm misanthropic. It seems to me I'm constantly disappointed. I'm very easily disappointed.

— Bill Bryson

In any area of human endeavour, there is going to be mediocrity. You're going to find people who get money that they shouldn't get.

— Bill Bryson people

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

— Bill Bryson words

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

— Bill Bryson fun

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 joy

I understand cricket - what's going on, the scoring - but I can't understand why.

— Bill Bryson

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

— Bill Bryson time

Open your refrigerator door, and you summon forth more light than the total amount enjoyed by most households in the 18th century. The world at night, for much of history, was a very dark place indeed.

— Bill Bryson history

I assume he was descended from apes like all the rest of us, but clearly in his case it had been a fairly gentle slope.

— Bill Bryson end

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 music

It is not true that the English invented cricket as a way of making all other human endeavours look interesting and lively; that was merely an unintended side effect. I dont wish to denigrate a sport that is enjoyed by millions, some of them awake and facing the right way, but it is an odd game.

— Bill Bryson joy

My father liked Iowa. He lived his whole life in the state, and is even now working his way through eternity there, in Glendale Cemetery in Des Moines.

— Bill Bryson life

I have long known that it is part of Gods plan for me to spend a little time with each of the most stupid people on earth, and Mary Ellen was proof that even in the Appalachian woods I would not be spared. It became evident that she was a rarity.

— Bill Bryson god

But what is life to a lichen? Yet its impulse to exist, to be, is every bit as strong as ours — arguably even stronger. If I were told that I had to spend decades being a furry growth on a rock in the woods, I believe I would lose the will to go on.Page 336

— Bill Bryson life

I mused for a few moments on the question of which was worse, to lead a life so boring that you are easily enchanted or a life so full of stimulus that you are easily bored. But then it occurred to me that musing is a pointless waste of anyones time, and instead I went off to see if I could find a Baby Ruth candy bar, a far more profitable exercise.

— Bill Bryson life

When you come from Des Moines you either accept the fact without question and settle down with a girl called Bobbie and get a job in the Firestone factory and live there forever and ever or you spend your adolescence moaning at length about what a dump it is and how you cant wait to get out and then you settle down with a local girl named Bobbie and get a job in the Firestone factory and live there forever and ever.

— Bill Bryson live

Absolute brain size does not tell you everything — or possibly sometimes even much. Elephants and whales both have brains larger than ours, but you wouldnt have much trouble outwitting them in contract negotiations.Pages 446-447, footnote

— Bill Bryson time

As Edward P. Tryon of Columbia University once put it: In answer to the question of why it happened, I offer the modest proposal that our universe is simply one of those things that happen from time to time. To which adds Guth: Although the creation of a universe might be very unlikely, Tryon emphasized that no one had counted the failed attempts.On the Big Bang

— Bill Bryson war

I had to calm down because a state trooper pulled up alongside me at a traffic light and began looking at me with that sort of casual disdain you often get when you give a dangerously stupid person a gun and a squad car.

— Bill Bryson light

I know this goes without saying, but Stonehenge really was the most incredible accomplishment. It took five hundred men just to pull each sarsen, plus a hundred more to dash around positioning the rollers. Just think about it for a minute. Can you imagine trying to talk six hundred people into helping you drag a fifty-ton stone eighteen miles across the countryside and muscle it into an upright position, and then saying, Right, lads! Another twenty like that, plus some lintels and maybe a couple of dozen nice bluestones from Wales, and we can party! Whoever was the person behind Stonehenge was one dickens of a motivator, Ill tell you that.

— Bill Bryson art

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 ones face.Page 53

— Bill Bryson man

It was impossible to determine what he was saying, but I imagined he was telling all those present that they were nongs and maggots. I decided I quite liked watching the news with the sound off.

— Bill Bryson present

It would be lovely to think I had become a genius, he smiles, but the fact is that Ive forgotten most of it. Occasionally I can be watching University Challenge and a stray fact emerges from the recesses of my subconscious that I didnt know I knew, but for the most part Im as vague on the details as I ever was.

— Bill Bryson love

Much of the tablecloth was a series of grey smudges outlined in a large, irregular patch of yellow that looked distressingly like a urine stain.

— Bill Bryson sin

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 sin

Wow, look at all the places you can park,” he said, as if for all these years he had been cruising endlessly, unable to terminate a journey. For about a year the most dangerous place to drive in Des Moines was the parking lot of Merle Hay Mall because of all the cars speeding at joyous random angles across its boundless blacktop without reflecting that other happy souls might be doing likewise.p. 182

— Bill Bryson soul

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