803 Quotes by Bill Bryson

The way I see it, there are three reasons never to be unhappy. First, you were born. This in itself is a remarkable achievement.

I was heading to Nebraska. Now there’s a sentence you don’t want to say too often if you can possibly help it.

The bad news is that atoms are fickle and their time of devotion is fleeting – fleeting indeed. Even a long human life adds up to only about 650,000 hours. And when that modest milestone flashes past, or at some other point thereabouts, for reasons unknown your atoms will shut you down, silently disassemble, and go off to be other things. And that’s it for you.

Every kid I knew had a father with a little stash of men’s magazines which the father thought was secret and which the kid knew all about.

Is it raining out?’ the reception girl asked brightly as I filled in the registration card between sneezes and pauses to wipe water from my face with the back of my arm. ‘No, my ship sank and I had to swim the last seven miles.

Only twenty-six British universities have total endowments greater than the amount given annually to the Ohio State University football team. I.

Part of the power of travel is that you stand a good chance of being hollowed out by it. The lucky come back home complaining about crooked rug merchants and dishonest taxi drivers; the unlucky never come home at all.

The remarkable position in which we find ourselves is that we don’t actually know what we actually know.

It seemed such an extraordinary notion – that I could set off from home and walk 1,800 miles through woods to Georgia, or turn the other way and clamber over the rough and stony White Mountains to the fabled prow of Mount Katahdin, floating in forest 450 miles to the north in a wilderness few have seen. A little voice in my head said: “Sounds neat! Let’s do it!