803 Quotes by Bill Bryson

Anyone who has read my books will know that I don’t tend to use guides when I am travelling. It’s not a pride thing, but it is certainly a fact.

I suppose – I was on a long flight across the Pacific, staring idly out the window at moonlit ocean, when it occurred to me with a certain uncomfortable forcefulness that I didn’t know the first thing about the only planet I was ever going to live on.

Traveling is more fun – hell, life is more fun – if you can treat it as a series of impulses.

For the universe to exist as it does requires that hydrogen be converted to helium in a precise but comparatively stately manner. Tweak the numbers even slightly and we would not be here. Optical.

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.

Among the tiny atomic structures the plankton take to the grave with them are two very stable isotopes – oxygen-16 and oxygen-18.

It’s an unnerving thought that we may be the living universe’s supreme achievement and its worst nightmare simultaneously.

The older you get the more it seems the world belongs to other people.

All over America today people would be dragging themselves to work, stuck in traffic jams, wreathed in exhaust smoke. I was going for a walk in the woods.