803 Quotes by Bill Bryson

You can get some sense of the immaterial quality of clouds by strolling through fog – which is, after all, nothing more than a cloud that lacks the will to fly.

One of the hardest ideas for humans to accept,” he says, “is that we are not the culmination of anything.

The fact is,” he says, “we are really no better prepared for a bad outbreak today than we were when Spanish flu killed tens of millions of people a hundred years ago. The reason we haven’t had another experience like that isn’t because we have been especially vigilant. It’s because we have been lucky.

It’s a funny thing because Britain was in a terrible state in those days. It limped from crisis to crisis. It was known as the Sick Man of Europe. It was in every way poorer than now. Yet there were flower beds in roundabouts, libraries and post offices in every village, cottage hospitals in abundance, council housing for all who needed it. It was a country so comfortable and enlightened that hospitals maintained cricket pitches for their staff and mental patients lived in Victorian palaces.

Life on Earth, you see, is not only brief but dismayingly tenuous.

H. L. Mencken called it “the one authentic rectum of civilization,” but for most people Hollywood was a place of magic.

The one known cure for baldness is castration.

I had always thought that once you grew up you could do anything you wanted – stay up all night or eat ice-cream straight out of the container.

English is full of booby traps for the unwary foreigner. Any language where the unassuming word fly signifies an annoying insect, a means of travel, and a critical part of a gentleman’s apparel is clearly asking to be mangled.