Bill Bryson Quotes

The patients on Tuke Ward were a pleasant and tractable bunch and practised insanity with a certain elan.

The positive side of thinking you are about to die is that it does make you glad of the little life that is left to you.

The reason for this is that the universe bends, in a way we can’t adequately imagine,

The reason the Forest Service builds these roads, quite apart from the deep pleasure of doing noisy things in the woods with big yellow machines, is to allow private timber companies to get to previou...

The rooms were small and airless and cramped. To make matters worse, somebody in our group was making the most dreadful silent farts. Fortunately, it was me, so I wasn’t nearly as bothered as the othe...

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.

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...

The way I see it, there are three reasons never to be unhappy. First, you were born. This in itself is a remarkable achievement.

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...

There is a critical threshold where the natural biosphere stops buffering us from the effects of our emissions and actually starts to amplify them.

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...

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 no question that a Neanderthal could easily beat us up. So, too, presumably could their women, which may be why we are only 2 percent Neanderthal instead of 50 percent. Those bitches were too...

There is simply no compelling reason we know of to explain why human brains got large,’ says Tattersall. Huge brains are demanding organs: they make up only 2 per cent of the body’s mass, but devour 2...

These are all just informed guesses.

They are taking away all the nice things there because they are impractical, as if that were reason enough – the red phone-boxes, the pound note, those open London buses that you can leap on and off....

They can tell us not only what Shakespeare wrote but what he read. Geoffrey Bullough devoted a lifetime, nearly, to tracking down all possible sources for virtually everything mentioned in Shakespeare...

They climbed back into the dish with brooms and scrubbing brushes and carefully swept it clean of what they referred to in a later paper as white dielectric material, or what is known more commonly as...

They were, in short, dangerously unprepared for the rigors ahead, and they demonstrated their incompetence in the most dramatic possible way: by dying in droves. Six

Things reached such a pitch that at one conference Bohr remarked of a new theory that the question was not whether it was crazy, but whether it was crazy enough. To illustrate the non-intuitive nature...