803 Quotes by Bill Bryson

Indeed, it has been suggested that there isn’t a single bit of any of us – not so much as a stray molecule8 – that was part of us nine years ago. It may not feel like it, but at the cellular level we are all youngsters.

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.

The friendliness of Australians – all of it quite sincere and spontaneous, as far as I could ever tell – never ceases to amaze or gratify.

There is something about the pace and scale of British life – an appreciation of small pleasures, a kind of restraint with respect to greed, generally speaking – that makes life strangely agreeable. The British really are the only people in the world who become genuinely enlivened when presented with a hot beverage and a small plain biscuit.

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.

The whole of the global economy is based on supplying the cravings of two per cent of the world’s population.

You have your whole life ahead of you. But here’s the thing to remember. You will always have your whole life ahead of you. That never stops and you shouldn’t forget it.

The upshot of all this is that we live in a universe whose age we can’t quite compute, surrounded by stars whose distances we don’t altogether know, filled with matter we can’t identify, operating in conformance with physical laws whose properties we don’t truly understand.

Facts are surprisingly delible things, and in four hundred years a lot of them simply fade away. One of the most popular plays of the age was Arden of Faversham, but no one now knows who wrote it. When an author’s identity is known, that knowledge is often marvelously fortuitous.