The people are immensely likable- cheerful, extrovert, quick-witted, and unfailingly obliging. Their cities are safe and clean and nearly always built on water. They have a society that is prosperous, well ordered, and instinctively egalitarian.
BILL BRYSONThe whole of the global economy is based on supplying the cravings of two per cent of the world’s population.
More Bill Bryson Quotes
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To me, the greatest invention of my lifetime is the laptop computer and the fact that I can be working on a book and be in an airport lounge, in a hotel room, and continue working; I fire up my laptop, and I’m in exactly the same place I was when I left home – that, to me, is a miracle.
BILL BRYSON -
In France, a chemist named Pilatre de Rozier tested the flammability of hydrogen by gulping a mouthful and blowing across an open flame, proving at a stroke that hydrogen is indeed explosively combustible and that eyebrows are not necessarily a permanent feature of one’s face.
BILL BRYSON -
A sign in the yard of a church next door said CHRIST IS THE ANSWER. (The question, of course, is: What do you say when you strike your thumb with a hammer?)
BILL BRYSON -
Your pillow alone may be home to 40 million bed mites. (To them your head is just one large oily bon-bon). And don’t think a clean pillow-case will make a difference…
BILL BRYSON -
I understand cricket – what’s going on, the scoring – but I can’t understand why.
BILL BRYSON -
A cough so robust that I tapped into two new seams of phlegm.
BILL BRYSON -
A third…candidate for Shakespearean authorship was Christopher Marlowe. He was the right age (just two months older than Shakespeare), had the requisite talent, and would certainly have had ample leisure after 1593, assuming he wasn’t too dead to work.
BILL BRYSON -
The English invented cricket to make other human endeavors look interesting.
BILL BRYSON -
When you tell an Iowan a joke, you can see a kind of race going on between his brain and his expression.
BILL BRYSON -
Hunters will tell you that a moose is a wily and ferocious forest creature. Nonsense. A moose is a cow drawn by a three-year-old.
BILL BRYSON -
Australians are very unfair in this way. They spend half of any conversation insisting that the country’s dangers are vastly overrated and that there’s nothing to worry about.
BILL BRYSON -
When I was growing up I used to think that the best thing about coming from Des Moines was that it meant you didn’t come from anywhere else in Iowa. By Iowa standards.
BILL BRYSON -
You can be a scientist and believe in god: the two can go hand in hand.
BILL BRYSON -
Human beings would split the atom and invent television, nylon, and instant coffee before they could figure out the age of their own planet.
BILL BRYSON -
It’s hard not to be kind of pessimistic about human beings generally, because we do tend to mess things up. If you just look at the history of extinctions, we’ve killed off an awful lot of animals – and I don’t think we’re doing a very good job of looking after the planet.
BILL BRYSON







