Bill Bryson quotes - page 3

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? (Bill Bryson)
Geologists are never at a loss for paperweights. View quote
Bill Bryson
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. View quote
Bill Bryson
18th century scientists, the French in particular, seldom did things simply if an absurdly demanding alternative was available. View quote
Bill Bryson
I see litter as part of a long continuum of anti-social behaviour. View quote
Bill Bryson
It is a curious feature of our existance that we come from a planet that is very good at promoting life but even better at extinguishing it. View quote
Bill Bryson
I became quietly seized with that nostalgia that overcomes you when you have reached the middle of your life and your father has recently died and it dawns on you that when he went he took some of you with him. View quote
Bill Bryson
When you sit in a chair, you are not actually sitting there, but levitating above it at a height of one angstrom (a hundred millionth of a centimetre), your electrons and its electrons implacably opposed to any closer intimacy. View quote
Bill Bryson
Isn´t it strange how wealth is always wasted on the rich? View quote
Bill Bryson
Tell me, did they specify 'asshole' on the job description, or did you take a course? View quote
Bill Bryson
The thing about the Army Corps of Engineers is that they don't build things very well. (Bill Bryson)
When the poet Paul Valery once asked Albert Einstein if he kept a notebook to record his ideas, Einstein looked at him with mild but genuine surprise. "Oh, that's not necessary," he replied. "It's so seldom I have one. View quote
Bill Bryson
I was heading to Nebraska. Now there's a sentence you don't want to say too often if you can possibly help it. View quote
Bill Bryson
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, and Mary Ellen was proof that even in the Appalachian woods I would not be spared. It became evident from the first moment that she was a rarity. View quote
Bill Bryson
Life just wants to be; but it doesn't want to be much. View quote
Bill Bryson
Just down the road stood a little town, which I shall call Dullard lest the people recognize themselves and take me to court or come to my house and batter me with baseball bats. View quote
Bill Bryson
Above all, what is oddest to the outsider is that Aborigines just aren't there. View quote
Bill Bryson
My wife [...] recently put me on a diet after suggesting (a little unkindly, if you ask me), that I was beginning to look like something Richard Branson would try to get airborne. View quote
Bill Bryson
In those days kitchen matches were heavy-duty implements-more like signal flares than the weedy sticks we get today. You could strike them on any hard surface and fling them at least fifteen feet and they wouldn't go out. Indeed, even when being beaten vigorously with two hands, as when lodged on the front of one's sweater, they seemed positively determined not to fail. View quote
Bill Bryson
On April 3, 1956, according to news reports, a Mrs. Julia Chase of Hagerstown, Maryland, while on a tour of the White House, slipped away from her tour group and vanished into the heart of the building. For four and a half hours, Mrs. Chase, who was described later as "dishevelled, vague and not quite lucid,” wandered through the White House, setting small fires-five in all. That's how tight security was in those days: a not-quite-lucid woman was able to roam unnoticed through the executive mansion for more than half a working day. View quote
Bill Bryson
He hit the water-impacted really is the word for it-at over six hundred miles an hour, with a report so loud that it made birds fly out of trees up to three miles away. At such a speed water effectively becomes a solid. I don't believe Mr. Milton penetrated it at all, but just bounced off it about fifteen feet, limbs suddenly very loose, and then lay on top of it, still, like an autumn leaf, spinning gently. (Bill Bryson)
One of my duties, this week, is to open the new Ustinov college," he confesses, "and while I'm delighted that Durham should honour its former chancellor this way - and I sincerely hope it continues this tradition for me - I can't help feeling that an American university would only have done so had the chancellor also handed over a substantial amount of dosh. View quote
Bill Bryson
I remember being profoundly amazed that anyone would suppose that a little wooden desk would provide a safe haven in the event of an atomic bomb being dropped on Des Moines. But evidently they all took the matter seriously, for even the teacher, Miss Squat Little Fat Thing, was inserted under her desk, too-or at least as much of her as she could get under, which was perhaps 40 percent. Once I realized that no one was watching, I elected not to take part. I already knew how to get under a desk and was confident that this was not a skill that would ever need refreshing. View quote
Bill Bryson
If the mattress stains were anything to go by, a previous user had not so much suffered from incontinence as rejoiced in it. He had evidently included the pillow in his celebrations. View quote
Bill Bryson
It is natural human impulse to think of evolution as a long chain of improvements, of a never-ending advance towards largeness and complexity - in a word, towards us. We flatter ourselves. Most of the real diversity in evolution has been small-scale. We large things are just flukes - an interesting side branch. View quote
Bill Bryson