Bill Bryson
88 quotes
Biography
"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?"
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"Energy is liberated matter, matter is energy waiting to happen."
"Consider the Lichen. Lichens are just about the hardiest visible organisms on Earth, but the least ambitious."
"She was torn between her customer service training and her youthful certitude."
"I come from Des Moines. Somebody had to."
"When you come from Des Moines you either accept the fact without question and settle down with a girl called Bobbi and get a job in the Firestone factory and live there forever and ever or you spend your adolescence moaning at length about what a dump it is and how you can't wait to get out and then you settle down with a local girl named Bobbi and get a job in the Firestone factory and live there forever and ever."
"My father liked Iowa. He lived his whole life in the state, and is even now working his way through eternity there, in Glendale Cemetery in Des Moines."
"I had to calm down because a state trooper pulled up alongside me at a traffic light and began looking at me with that sort of casual disdain you often get when you give a dangerously stupid person a gun and a squad car."
"I assume he was descended from apes like all the rest of us, but clearly in his case it had been a fairly gentle slope."
"I watched a rerun on television of a 1960s comedy programme called "Mr Ed", which was about a talking horse. Judging by the quality of the jokes, I would guess that Mr Ed wrote his own material."
"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."
"A sign in the yard of a church next door said CHRIST IS THE ANSWER. (The question, of course, is: What do you say when you strike your thumb with a hammer?)"
"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. But then it occurred to me that musing is a pointless waste of anyone's time, and instead I went off to see if I could find a Baby Ruth candy bar, a far more profitable exercise."
"For forty years or so this was the world headquarters of conspicuous consumption."
"Much of the tablecloth was a series of grey smudges outlined in a large, irregular patch of yellow that looked distressingly like a urine stain."
"We used to build civilizations. Now we build shopping malls."
"The best that can be said for Norwegian television is that it gives you the sensation of a coma without the worry and inconvenience."
"Bryson. You’ve got three kinds of chromosomes: X, Y and fuck-head. - Katz"
"I don't care how paranoid and irrational this makes me sound, but I know for a fact that the people of Paris want me dead."
"We couldn't place their accents but we thought the smaller one might be Australian since he seemed so at home down under."
"Why, it's a perfect little city. If you have never been to Durham, go there at once. Take my car. It's wonderful."