803 Quotes by 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.

For us, the universe goes only as far as light has travelled in the billions of years since the universe was formed.

My first rule of consumerism is never to buy anything you can’t make your children carry.

Every atom you possess has almost certainly passed through several stars and been part of millions of organisms on its way to becoming you. We are each so atomically numerous and so vigorously recycled at death that a significant number of our atoms – up to a billion for each of us, it has been suggested – probably once belonged to Shakespeare.

Life just wants to be; but it doesn’t want to be much.

Italians are entirely without any commitment to order. They live their lives in a kind of pandemonium, which I find very attractive.

Take it from me, if you are in an open space with no weapons and a grizzly comes for you, run. You may as well. If nothing else, it will give you something to do with the last seven seconds of your life.

All the things that are part of your heritage make you British – that makes this country what it is. It’s part of your history. And here, unlike America, it’s still living history.

Instead, we were given the period of unusual tranquillity known as the Holocene, the time in which we live now.