Bill Bryson Quotes

On a cooler sun on a primordial earth: "I later learned that biologists, when they are feeling jocose, refer to this as the 'Chinese Resaturant Problem'--because we has a dim sun.

Just because a word or expression has an antiquity or was once widely used does not confer on it some special immunity

It was so bad, it was worth more than we paid.

It seems impossible that you could get something from nothing, but the fact that once there was nothing and now there is a universe is evident proof that you can.

Widespread commercial distribution of ice was so new that 300 tons of the precious commodity melted at one port while customs officials tried to figure out how to classify it.

Describing his experience with the sting of an extremely toxic jellyfish, he did something you don't often see a scientist do: he shivered.

A computer is a stupid machine with the ability to do incredibly smart things, while computer programmers are smart people with the ability to do incredibly stupid things.

It was a lot more fun to get famous than to be famous.

Linguist say parties in the conversation will tolerate silence for four seconds before interjecting anything, however unrelated.

They talk about big skies in the western United States, and they may indeed have them, but you have never seen such lofty clouds, such towering anvils, as in Iowa in July.

Imagine having a city full of things that no other city had.

Worse still, it isn’t actually necessary to look to space for petrifying danger. As we are about to see, Earth can provide plenty of danger of its own.

You are totally at the mercy of nature in this country, mate. It's just a fact of life.

[Americans] were, for one thing, so smitten with the idea of progress that they invented things without having any idea whether those things would be of any use.

Tunney has all the makings of a hero – he was clean living, intelligent, polite, reasonably good-looking – but, like Lou Gehrig, he lacked the chemistry that stirred affection.

The current best estimate for the Earth’s weight is 5.9725 billion trillion tonnes, a difference of only about 1 per cent from Cavendish’s finding.

Noting the lack of crime or security in the Netherlands, the author asked a native who guarded a national landmark. He got the replay, "We all do.

For the moment we might very well can them DUNNOS (for Dark Unknown Nonreflective Nondetectable Objects Somewhere).

The youth of Idaho falls should be encouraged to take drugs in order to cope up with the fact that there is plutonium in their drinking water.

The author says the earliest Australian aborigines devoted extraordinary amounts of energy to enterprises no one now can understand.

She would only make me take my seat if I didn't act calm and Swiss about it all.

I love to watch cities wake up, and Paris wakes up more abruptly, more startlingly, than any place I know.