Bill Bryson Quotes

Not until 1902, at an early meeting of the International Congress of Zoology, did naturalists begin at last to show a spirit of compromise and adopt a universal code. Taxonomy

A hundred years after his death, a statue of Lavoisier was erected in Paris and much admired until someone pointed out that it looked nothing like him. Under questioning the sculptor admitted that he...

But for reasons that genuinely escape me, it has also become spectacularly accommodating to stupidity. Where this thought most recently occurred to me was in a hotel coffee shop in Baltimore, where I...

Camouflage (rather oddly from camouflet, meaning to blow smoke up someone’s nose, a pastime that appears on the linguistic evidence to be specific to the French),

I found my wife at the kitchen sink and told her the good news. She was more reserved in her enthusiasm than I had hoped. You’re going into the woods for weeks and weeks with a person you have barely...

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

As recently as the eighteenth century, England happily installed a German king, George I, even though he spoke not a word of English and reigned for thirteen years without mastering his subjects’ lang...

Amoral, immoral. Amoral describes matters in which questions of morality do not arise or are disregarded; immoral applies to things that are evil.

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?

Thanks to years of travel at other people’s expense, I have a lifetime supply of soaps, small bottles of shampoo, aromatic lotions, sewing kits, and shoe mitts. I have over eleven hundred shower caps...

There are loads of people like us. We are all here because we like it here or are married to Britons or both. If I may say so, you are a little more cosmopolitan, possibly even a little more dynamic a...

Noise is everywhere in America. Waitresses shout orders to the cook. Bus drivers shout at passengers. Checkin-in clerks bark: Next in line! Baristas at Starbucks shout: Conchita, your order's ready! (...

Acute, chronic. These two are sometimes confused, which is a little odd as their meanings are sharply opposed. Chronic pertains to lingering conditions, ones that are not easily overcome. Acute refers...

Activity. Often a sign of prolixity, as here: ‘The warnings followed a week of earthquake activity throughout the region’ (Independent). Just make it ‘a week of earthquakes’.

A sign by the highway said DON’T LITTER, KEEP ALABAMA THE BEAUTIFUL. ‘OK, I the will,’ I replied cheerfully

I left Los Angeles on 3 January and arrived in Sydney fourteen hours later on 5 January. For me there was no 4 January. None at all. Where it went exactly I couldn’t tell you. All I know is that for o...

Everyone has a supremely low moment somewhere along the AT, usually when the urge to quit the trail becomes almost overpowering. The irony of my moment was that I wanted to get back on the trail and d...

By the late eighteenth century Britain’s statute books were plump with capital offences; you could be hanged for any of 200 acts, including, notably, ‘impersonating an Egyptian’.

There is no point in hurrying because you are not actually going anywhere. However far or long you plod, you are always in the same place: in the woods.

There is actually a certain value in not finding anything,’ he said. ‘It helps cosmologists to work out the rate at which galaxies are evolving. It’s one of those rare areas where the absence of evide...