I just use my life story as a kind of device on which to hang comic observations. It’s not my interest or instinct to tell the world anything pertinent about myself or my family.
BILL BRYSONFor most of us the rules of English grammar are at best a dimly remembered thing. But even for those who make the rules, grammatical correctitude sometimes proves easier to urge than to achieve.
More Bill Bryson Quotes
-
-
Physics is really nothing more than a search for ultimate simplicity, but so far all we have is a kind of elegant messiness.
BILL BRYSON -
It had no practical application in his lifetime, but today, thanks to computers, is routinely used in the modelling of climate change, astrophysics and stock-market analysis.
BILL BRYSON -
England was full of words I’d never heard before – streaky bacon, short back and sides, Belisha beacon, serviettes, high tea, ice-cream cornet.
BILL BRYSON -
If you believe in god, it’s much more fantastic to believe that he created this universe billions of years ago and set in motion this long train of activities that eventually resulted in us. I think that’s so much more satisfying, more thrilling, than the idea that it was all done in seven days.
BILL BRYSON -
Houses aren’t refuges from history. They are where history ends up.
BILL BRYSON -
Nearly a quarter of American men were in the Armed forces. The rest were in school, in prison, or were George W. Bush.
BILL BRYSON -
Not one of your pertinent ancestors was squashed, devoured, drowned, starved, stranded, stuck fast, untimely wounded, or otherwise deflected from its life’s quest of delivering a tiny charge of genetic material to the right partner at the right moment.
BILL BRYSON -
People don’t talk like this, theytalklikethis. Syllables, words, sentences run together like a watercolour left in the rain.
BILL BRYSON -
We are so used to the notion of our own inevitability as life’s dominant species that it is hard to grasp that we are here only because of timely extraterrestrial bangs and other random flukes.
BILL BRYSON -
Germans are flummoxed by humor, the Swiss have no concept of fun, the Spanish think there is nothing at all ridiculous about eating dinner at midnight, and the Italians should never, ever have been let in on the invention of the motor car.
BILL BRYSON -
From an evolutionary point of view, sex is really just a reward mechanism to encourage us to pass on our genetic material.
BILL BRYSON -
There is the odd exception, like Albert Einstein, but as a breed, scientists tend not be very good at presenting themselves.
BILL BRYSON -
There seemed to be a mystifying universal conspiracy among textbook authors to make certain the material they dealt with never strayed too near the realm of the mildly interesting and was always at least a long-distance phone call from the frankly interesting.
BILL BRYSON -
Protons give an atom its identity, electrons its personality.
BILL BRYSON -
I have long known that it is part of God’s plan for me to spend a little time with each of the most stupid people on earth.
BILL BRYSON