Bill Bryson Quotes

For most of its history until fairly recent times the general pattern for Earth was to be hot with no permanent ice anywhere. The current ice age—ice epoch really—started about forty million years ago...

For reasons that are still poorly understood, at depths beyond about 30 metres nitrogen becomes a powerful intoxicant. Under its influence divers had been known to offer their air hoses to passing fis...

For the universe to exist as it does requires that hydrogen be converted to helium in a precise but comparatively stately manner. Tweak the numbers even slightly and we would not be here. Optical

Generally speaking – which is of course always a dangerous thing to do, generally speaking – Americans revere the past only as long as there is some money in it somewhere and it doesn’t mean going wit...

So the first dinosaur bone ever found was also the first to be lost.

If the global temperature rises by 4°C over the next fifty years, as is evidently possible, the whole of the Appalachian wilderness below New England could become savanna. Already trees are dying in f...

Science is about making stuff, just as much as it is about understanding stuff.

There is still quite a lot of life out there, but it is mostly very small. According to a wildlife census by an ecologist at the University of Illinois named V. E. Shelford, a typical ten-square-mile...

If there is one thing certain about English pronunciation it is that there is almost nothing certain about it. No other language in the world has more words spelled the same way and yet pronounced dif...

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

I am not, I regret to say, a discreet and fetching sleeper. Most people when they nod off look as if they could do with a blanket; I look as if I could do with medical attention. I sleep as if injecte...

They determined, for instance, that a rusting object doesn’t lose weight, as everyone had long assumed, but gains weight – an extraordinary discovery.

I had a hangover you could sell to science,

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

Rome was as wonderful as I had hoped it would be, certainly a step up from Peoria.

I passed the time browsing in the windows of the many tourists shops that stand along it, reflecting on what a lot of things the Scots have given the world—kilts, bagpipes, tam-o’-shanters, tins of oa...

Salamanders are interesting, and don't let anyone tell you otherwise.

Perhaps it would be an idea to require developers to live on their own estates for five years, as a demonstration of their superb liveability. It’s just a thought. I

I remember once reading that the tenth Duke of Marlborough, on a visit to one of his daughter’s homes, announced in consternation from the top of the stairs that his toothbrush wasn’t foaming properly...

It sometimes occurs to me that the British have more heritage than is good for them. In a country where there is so astonishingly much of everything, it is easy to look on it as a kind of inexhaustibl...