110+ Bill Bryson Quotes On Australia, Humorous And Insightful

Bill Bryson is an American author, who has written several books on travel, language, and science. He is best known for his book A Walk in the Woods, which chronicles his attempt to walk the Appalachian Trail. He has also written several books on the history of the English language, including The Mother Tongue and Made in America. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Bill Bryson on life, australia, humorous.

Top 10 Bill Bryson Quotes

1. I can't think of anything that excites a greater sense of childlike wonder than to be in a country where you are ignorant of almost everything.
2. There are only three things that can kill a farmer: lightning, rolling over in a tractor, and old age.
3. If you can imagine a man having a vasectomy without anesthetic to the sound of frantic sitar-playing, you will have some idea of what popular Turkish music is like.
4. That's the trouble with losing your mind; by the time it's gone, it's too late to get it back.
5. Hunters will tell you that a moose is a wily and ferocious forest creature. Nonsense. A moose is a cow drawn by a three-year-old.
6. Geologists are never at a loss for paperweights.
7. Protons give an atom its identity, electrons its personality.
8. My first rule of travel is never to go to a place that sounds like a medical condition and Critz is clearly an incurable disease involving flaking skin.
9. Making English grammar conform to Latin rules is like asking people to play baseball using the rules of football.
10. In my day, the principal concerns of university students were sex, smoking dope, rioting and learning. Learning was something you did only when the first three weren't available.

Bill Bryson Short Quotes

• Christmas tree stands are the work of the devil and they want you dead.
• There is always a little more toothpaste in the tube. Think about it.
• We used to build civilizations. Now we build shopping malls.
• South Dakota... is like the world's first drive-through sensory deprivation chamber.
• In terms of adaptability, humans are pretty amazingly useless.
• I love the feeling of being anonymous in a city I've never been before.
• Houses aren't refuges from history. They are where history ends up.
• Life just wants to be; but it doesn't want to be much.
• Finally, this being America, there is the constant possibility of murder.
• It sometimes occurs to me that the British have more heritage than isgood for them.

Bill Bryson Quotes About Life

To my mind, the greatest reward and luxury of travel is to be able to experience everyday things as if for the first time, to be in a position in which almost nothing is so familiar it is taken for granted. — Bill Bryson

I could spend my life arriving each evening in a new city. — Bill Bryson

There are things you just can't do in life. You can't beat the phone company, you can't make a waiter see you until he's ready to see you, and you can't go home again. — Bill Bryson

It is a slightly arresting notion that if you were to pick yourself apart with tweezers, one atom at a time, you would produce a mound of fine atomic dust, none of which had ever been alive but all of which had once been you. — Bill Bryson

The food is excellent. The beer is cold. The sun nearly always shines. There is coffee on every corner. Life doesn’t get much better than this. — Bill Bryson

Because time moves more slowly in Kid World ... it goes on for decades ... It is adult life that is over in a twinkling. — Bill Bryson

I do find London exciting. Much as I hate to agree with that tedious old git Samuel Johnson, and despite the pompous imbecility of his famous remark about when a man is tired of London he is tired of life...I can't dispute it. — Bill Bryson

Traveling is more fun - hell, life is more fun - if you can treat it as a series of impulses. — Bill Bryson

When you consider it from a human perspective, and clearly it would be difficult for us to do otherwise, life is an odd thing. It couldn't wait to get going, but then, having gotten going, it seemed in very little hurry to move on. — Bill Bryson

I think it's only right that crazy people should have their own city, but I cannot for the life of me see why a sane person would want to go there. — Bill Bryson

Bill Bryson Quotes About Humorous

Germans are flummoxed by humor, the Swiss have no concept of fun, the Spanish think there is nothing at all ridiculous about eating dinner at midnight, and the Italians should never, ever have been let in on the invention of the motor car. — Bill Bryson

When you tell an Iowan a joke, you can see a kind of race going on between his brain and his expression. — Bill Bryson

He had the sort of face that makes you realize God does have a sense of humor. — Bill Bryson

Bill Bryson Quotes About Science

The universe is not only queerer than we suppose; it is queerer than we can suppose — Bill Bryson

Taxonomy is described sometimes as a science and sometimes as an art, but really it’s a battleground. — Bill Bryson

I really enjoy going to a library and spending the day doing research - to me that is the most pleasurable part of writing the science book. — Bill Bryson

You don't need a science degree to understand about science. You just need to think about it. — Bill Bryson

Language is more fashion than science, and matters of usage, spelling and pronunciation tend to wander around like hemlines. — Bill Bryson

Bill Bryson Famous Quotes And Sayings

Tune your television to any channel it doesn't receive and about 1 percent of the dancing static you see is accounted for by this ancient remnant of the Big Bang. The next time you complain that there is nothing on, remember that you can always watch the birth of the universe. — Bill Bryson

And I find chopsticks frankly distressing. Am I alone in thinking it odd that a people ingenious enough to invent paper, gunpowder, kites and any number of other useful objects, and who have a noble history extending back 3,000 years haven't yet worked out that a pair of knitting needles is no way to capture food? — Bill Bryson

Out of the thirty thousand types of edible plants thought to exist on Earth, just eleven—corn, rice, wheat, potatoes, cassava, sorghum, millet, beans, barley, rye, and oats—account for 93 percent of all that humans eat, and every one of them was first cultivated by our Neolithic ancestors. — Bill Bryson

I ordered a coffee and a little something to eat and savored the warmth and dryness. Somewhere in the background Nat King Cole sang a perky tune. I watched the rain beat down on the road outside and told myself that one day this would be twenty years ago. — Bill Bryson

To my mind, the only possible pet is a cow. Cows love you. They will listen to your problems and never ask a thing in return. They will be your friends forever. And when you get tired of them, you can kill and eat them. Perfect. — Bill Bryson

I sat on a toilet watching the water run thinking what an odd thing tourism is. You fly off to a strange land, eagerly abandoning all the comforts of home and then expend vast quantities of time and money in a largely futile effort to recapture the comforts you wouldn’t have lost if you hadn’t left home in the first place. — Bill Bryson

If you believe in god, it's much more fantastic to believe that he created this universe billions of years ago and set in motion this long train of activities that eventually resulted in us. I think that's so much more satisfying, more thrilling, than the idea that it was all done in seven days. — Bill Bryson

I tell the kids that, even in a childhood marked by despair and deprivation, I knew that no matter what happened, I still had my family, or at least the remnants of a family ripped apart by divorce and then glued back together in various odd arrangements through a series of ill- advised remarriages. It was good to know I had a solid foundation. — Bill Bryson

If a potato can produce vitamin C, why can't we? Within the animal kingdom only humans and guinea pigs are unable to synthesize vitamin C in their own bodies. Why us and guinea pigs? No point asking. Nobody knows. — Bill Bryson

In France, a chemist named Pilatre de Rozier tested the flammability of hydrogen by gulping a mouthful and blowing across an open flame, proving at a stroke that hydrogen is indeed explosively combustible and that eyebrows are not necessarily a permanent feature of one's face. — Bill Bryson

English is full of booby traps for the unwary foreigner. Any language where the unassuming word fly signifies an annoying insect, a means of travel, and a critical part of a gentleman's apparel is clearly asking to be mangled. — Bill Bryson

English grammar is so complex and confusing for the one very simple reason that its rules and terminology are based on Latin, a language with which it has precious little in common. — Bill Bryson

There is no reason why we shouldn't be able to split an infinitive, any more than we should forsake instant coffee and air travel because they weren't available to the Romans. — Bill Bryson

For a long time it puzzled me how something so expensive, so leading edge, could be so useless. And then it occurred to me that 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. They are, in short, a perfect match. — Bill Bryson

You may not feel outstandingly robust, but if you are an average-sized adult you will contain within your modest frame no less than 7 X 10^18 joules of potential energy—enough to explode with the force of thirty very large hydrogen bombs, assuming you knew how to liberate it and really wished to make a point. — Bill Bryson

I love everything about motels. I can't help myself. I still get excited every time I slip a key into a motel room door and fling it open. — Bill Bryson

Still, I never really mind bad service in a restaurant. It makes me feel better about not leaving a tip. — Bill Bryson

By the time I had finished my coffee and returned to the streets, the rain had temporarily abated, but the streets were full of vast puddles where the drains where unable to cope with the volume of water. Correct me if I'm wrong, but you would think that if one nation ought by now to have mastered the science of drainage, Britain would be it. — Bill Bryson

No one knows, incidentally, why Australia's spiders are so extravagantly toxic; capturing small insects and injecting them with enough poison to drop a horse would appear to be the most literal case of overkill. Still, it does mean that everyone gives them lots of space. — Bill Bryson

...and it occurred to me, with the forcefulness of a thought experienced in 360 degrees, that that's really what history mostly is: masses of people doing ordinary things. — Bill Bryson

You can always tell a Midwestern couple in Europe because they will be standing on a traffic island in the middle of a busy intersection looking at a windblown map and arguing over which way is west. European cities, with their wandering streets and undisciplined alleys, drive Midwesterners practically insane. — Bill Bryson

Distance changes utterly when you take the world on foot. A mile becomes a long way, two miles literally considerable, ten miles whopping, fifty miles at the very limits of conception. The world, you realize, is enormous in a way that only you and a small community of fellow hikers know. Planetary scale is your little secret. — Bill Bryson

Clearly, some time ago makers and consumers of American junk food passed jointly through some kind of sensibility barrier in the endless quest for new taste sensations. Now they are a little like those desperate junkies who have tried every known drug and are finally reduced to mainlining toilet bowl cleanser in an effort to get still higher. — Bill Bryson

I still enjoy traveling a lot. I mean, it amazes me that I still get excited in hotel rooms just to see what kind of shampoo they've left me. — Bill Bryson

To an American the whole purpose of living, the one constant confirmation of continued existence, is to cram as much as sensual pleasure as possible into one's mouth more or less continuously. Gratification, instant and lavish, is a birthright — Bill Bryson

After years of patient study (and with cricket there can be no other kind), I have decided that there is nothing wrong with the game that the introduction of golf carts wouldn't fix in a hurry. — Bill Bryson

Strange as it may seem, wrote Richard Feynman, we understand the distribution of matter in the interior of the Sun far better than we understand the interior of the Earth. — Bill Bryson

There is more difference between a zebra and a horse, or between a dolphin and a porpoise, than there is between you and the furry creatures your distant ancestors left behind when they set out to take over the world. — Bill Bryson

There are three stages in scientific discovery. First, people deny that it is true, then they deny that it is important; finally they credit the wrong person. — Bill Bryson

Everything seems to be designed for the benefit of the automobile and not the benefit of the human being. — Bill Bryson

... it occurred to me that never again would he be seven years, one month and six days old, so we had better catch these moments while we can. — Bill Bryson

I turned to my own bunk and examined it with a kind of appalled fascination. 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. — 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. — Bill Bryson

Human beings would split the atom and invent television, nylon, and instant coffee before they could figure out the age of their own planet. — Bill Bryson

Absolute brain size does not tell you everything or possibly sometimes even much. Elephants and whales both have brains larger than ours, but you wouldn't have much trouble outwitting them in contract negotiations. — Bill Bryson

The average Southerner has the speech patterns of someone slipping in and out of consciousness. I can change my shoes and socks faster than most people in Mississippi can speak a sentence. — Bill Bryson

People don't talk like this, theytalklikethis. Syllables, words, sentences run together like a watercolour left in the rain. To understand what anyone is saying to us we must separate these noises into words and the words into sentences so that we might in our turn issue a stream of mixed sounds in response. — Bill Bryson

It is not as if farming brought a great improvement in living standards either. A typical hunter-gatherer enjoyed a more varied diet and consumed more protein and calories than settled people, and took in five times as much viatmin C as the average person today. — Bill Bryson

Traveling makes you realize what an immeasurably nice place much of America could be if only people possessed the same instinct for preservation as they do in Europe. — Bill Bryson

Open your refrigerator door, and you summon forth more light than the total amount enjoyed by most households in the 18th century. The world at night, for much of history, was a very dark place, indeed. — Bill Bryson

As the saying goes, it takes all kinds to make the world go around, though perhaps some shouldn't go quite so far around it as others. — Bill Bryson

We are so used to the notion of our own inevitability as life's dominant species that it is hard to grasp that we are here only because of timely extraterrestrial bangs and other random flukes. The one thing we have in common with all other living things is that for nearly four billions years our ancestors have managed to slip through a series of closing doors every time we needed them to. — Bill Bryson

Energy is liberated matter, matter is energy waiting to happen. — Bill Bryson

I mused for a few moments on the question of which was worse, to lead a life so boring that you are easily enchanted, or a life so full of stimulus that you are easily bored. — Bill Bryson

The human diet consists of just nine plants: corn, rice, wheat, potatoes, cassava, sorghum, millet, beans, barley, rye and oats. — Bill Bryson

Taking a scenic route in Southeast Iowa is like talking about a good Barry Manilow album. You have to make certain allowances. — Bill Bryson

Consider the Lichen. Lichens are just about the hardiest visible organisms on Earth, but the least ambitious. — Bill Bryson

I come from Des Moines. Someone had to. — Bill Bryson

Not writing the same kind of book over and over again is to me the real pleasure of what I do. — Bill Bryson

Take a moment from time to time to remember that you are alive. I know this sounds a trifle obvious, but it is amazing how little time we take to remark upon this singular and gratifying fact. By the most astounding stroke of luck an infinitesimal portion of all the matter in the universe came together to create you and for the tiniest moment in the great span of eternity you have the incomparable privilege to exist. — Bill Bryson

Hardly anyone ever leaves. This is because Des Moines is the most powerful hypnotic known to man. Outside town there is a big sign that says, WELCOME TO DES MOINES. THIS IS WHAT DEATH IS LIKE. There isn't really. I just made that up. But the place does get a grip on you. — Bill Bryson

Entirely incidentally, a little-known fact about Shakespeare is that his father moved to Stratford-upon-Avon from a nearby village shortly before his son's birth. Had he not done so, the Bard of Avon would instead be known as the rather less ringing Bard of Snitterfield. — Bill Bryson

18th century scientists, the French in particular, seldom did things simply if an absurdly demanding alternative was available. — Bill Bryson

Of all the things I am not very good at, living in the real world is perhaps the most outstanding. — Bill Bryson

When I was growing up I used to think that the best thing about coming from Des Moines was that it meant you didn't come from anywhere else in Iowa. By Iowa standards, Des Moines is a mecca of cosmopolitanism, a dynamic hub of wealth and education, where people wear three-piece suits and dark socks, often simultaneously. — 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. — Bill Bryson

As a rule of thumb, I would submit that if you need to call your floss provider, for any reason, you are probably not ready for this level of oral hygiene. — Bill Bryson

I come Des Moines. Somebody had to. — Bill Bryson

A cough so robust that I tapped into two new seams of phlegm. — Bill Bryson

I'm quite certain that if the rest of the world vanished overnight and the development of cricket were left in Australian hands, within a generation, the players would be wearing shorts and using the bats to hit each other, and the thing is, it'd be a much better game for it. — Bill Bryson

The people are immensely likable— cheerful, extrovert, quick-witted, and unfailingly obliging. Their cities are safe and clean and nearly always built on water. They have a society that is prosperous, well ordered, and instinctively egalitarian. The food is excellent. The beer is cold. The sun nearly always shines. There is coffee on every corner. Life doesn't get much better than this. — 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. — Bill Bryson

The best that can be said for Norwegian television is that it gives you the sensation of a coma without the worry and inconvenience. — Bill Bryson

"Croissant": However you choose to pronounce it at home, it is perhaps worth nothing that outside the United States, the closer you can come to saying "kwass-ohn," the sooner you can expect to be presented with one. — Bill Bryson

Most big companies don't like you very much, except hotels, airlines and Microsoft, which don't like you at all. — Bill Bryson

The English invented cricket to make other human endeavors look interesting. — Bill Bryson

What this means in practice is that if you are not a born worrier you have nothing to worry about (though of course you wouldn't be worrying anyway), whereas if you are a worrier by nature there is absolutely nothing you can do about it, so you may as well stop worrying, except of course you can't. — Bill Bryson

On the dashboard of our family car is a shallow indentation about the size of a paperback book. If you are looking for somewhere to put your sunglasses or spare change, it is the obvious place, and it works extremely well, I must say, so long as the car is not actually moving. However, as soon as you put the car in motion ... everything slides off ... It can hold nothing that has not been nailed to it. So I ask you: what then is it for? — Bill Bryson

My favourite fellow of the Royal Society is the Reverend Thomas Bayes, an obscure 18th-century Kent clergyman and a brilliant mathematician who devised a complex equation known as the Bayes theorem, which can be used to work out probability distributions. It had no practical application in his lifetime, but today, thanks to computers, is routinely used in the modelling of climate change, astrophysics and stock-market analysis. — Bill Bryson

I often feel I'm a disappointment to people because they expect me to be the guy in the books. When I sit next to someone at a dinner party I can see they expect me to be quick and witty, and I'm not at all. — Bill Bryson

Being a pessimist is just such a gloomy way of looking at things, so I have to hope for the best - life wouldn't be worth living if we didn't have hope. And I also do think that human beings often do do wonderful, correct, brilliant things. So, on balance, I'd like to be optimistic about the future. — Bill Bryson

Romans park their cars the way I would park if I had just spilled a beaker of hydrochloric acid on my lap. — Bill Bryson

At a conference of sociologists in America in 1977, love was defined as "the cognitive-affective state characterized by intrusive and obsessive fantasizing concerning reciprocity of amorant feelings by the object of the amorance." That is jargon - the practice of never calling a spade a spade when you might instead call it a manual earth-restructuring implement - and it is one of the great curses of modern English. — Bill Bryson

Beulah has a husband?' I know. It's a miracle. There can't be more than two people on the planet who'd be willing to sleep with her, and here we are both in the same town. — Bill Bryson

It's hard not to be kind of pessimistic about human beings generally, because we do tend to mess things up. If you just look at the history of extinctions, we've killed off an awful lot of animals - and I don't think we're doing a very good job of looking after the planet. — Bill Bryson

Four times I was honked at for having the temerity to proceed through town without the benefit of metal. — Bill Bryson

There is something about the momentum of travel that makes you want to just keep moving, to never stop. — Bill Bryson

My first rule of consumerism is never to buy anything you can't make your children carry. — Bill Bryson

Life Lessons by Bill Bryson

1. Bill Bryson encourages us to take time to appreciate the little moments in life and to make the most of our experiences. He also emphasizes the importance of having a sense of humor and being able to laugh at ourselves.
2. He reminds us that life is too short to take ourselves too seriously, and that we should strive to make the most of each day.
3. Finally, he encourages us to be open to new experiences and to learn from our mistakes, as these can often be the most valuable lessons of all.