Bill Bryson Quotes

The belief that and should not be used to begin a sentence is without foundation. And that's all there is to it.

The best indicator of personal risk is whether you have fallen much before. Accident proneness is a slightly controversial area among stair-injury epidemiologists, but it does seem to be a reality. Ab...

The bone was sent to Dr. Caspar Wistar, the nation’s leading anatomist, who described it at a meeting of the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia that autumn.

The chances of a 1,055-sequence molecule like collagen spontaneously self-assembling are, frankly, nil.

The disputes are entertainingly surveyed in Charles Elliott’s The Potting-Shed Papers.

The early colonists were among the first to use the new word goodbye, contracted from God be with you and still at that time often spelled Godbwye,

The hardest part was coming to terms with the constant dispiriting discovery that there is always more hill.

The household was so crowded that the secretary—a man named Pieper—had to share a bed with Marx. (Somehow, even so, Marx managed to put together enough private moments to seduce and impregnate the hou...

The marriage license itself is lost, but a separate document, the marriage bond, survives. On it Anne Hathaway is correctly identified. Shakespeare’s name is rendered as Shagspere—the first of many ar...

The most splendid thing about the Amish is the names they give their towns. Everywhere else in America towns are named either after the first white person to get there or the last Indian to leave. But...

The number of people on whose cooperative efforts your eventual existence depends has risen to approximately 1,000,000,000,000,000,000, which is several thousand times the total number of people who h...

The one thing he didn’t do was discover the comet that bears his name.

The people of Cody like you to think that Buffalo Bill was a native son. In fact, I’m awfully proud to tell you, he was an Iowa native, born in the little town of Le Claire in 1846. The people of Cody...

The price paid was £700 – which historians are always obliged to qualify with the phrase ‘a considerable amount of money in those days’. However, no price is relevant when the prize is priceless.

The red shift gives the speed at which galaxies are retiring, but doesn’t tell us how far away they are to begin with.

The story of Kelly is easily told. He was a murderous thug who deserved to be hanged and was. He came from a family of rough Irish settlers, who made their living by stealing livestock and waylaying i...

The upshot of all this is that we live in a universe whose age we can’t quite compute, surrounded by stars whose distances from us and each other we don’t altogether know, filled with matter we can’t...

The woman who engaged him had no idea that her gardener was one of the most distinguished scientists in Britain until a friend came for tea one day and, looking out the window, casually asked: My dear...

The worst imposition of all was to be instructed to take on some costly, long-standing obligation to the crown. Such was the fate of Bess of Hardwick’s husband, the sixth Lord Shrewsbury. For sixteen...

Then there were all the diseases one is vulnerable to in the woods — giardiasis, eastern equine encephalitis, Rocky Mountain spotted fever, Lyme disease, ehrlichiosis, schistosomiasis, brucellosis, an...