black
grey
blue
red
brown
white

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

Bill Bryson

It isn’t easy to become a fossil. … Only about one bone in a billion, it is thought, becomes fossilized. If that is so, it means that the complete fossil legacy of all the Americans alive today.
BILL BRYSON

Mean Science Skeletons
18th century scientists, the French in particular, seldom did things simply if an absurdly demanding alternative was available.
BILL BRYSON

Alternatives Century Scientist
To understand what anyone is saying to us we must separate these noises into words and the words into sentences so that we might in our turn issue a stream of mixed sounds in response.
BILL BRYSON

Noises Sentences Separate Stream Understand
I wanted to see what was out there. 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. I was more than ready for this.
BILL BRYSON

Going Themselves Wanted Wood Work Wreathed
…and it occurred to me, with the forcefulness of a thought experienced in 360 degrees, that that’s really what history mostly is: masses of people doing ordinary things.
BILL BRYSON

Degree Ordinary People
Suddenly you are five years old again. You can’t read anything, you have only the most rudimentary sense of how things work, you can’t even reliably cross a street without endangering your life. Your whole existence becomes a series of interesting guesses.
BILL BRYSON

Cross Rudimentary Street Suddenly Things Work
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 BRYSON

Beer Cheerful Cities Coffee
You don’t have to know anything about baseball to respond to Babe Ruth because he’s just this magnificent human being.
BILL BRYSON

Baseball Kids Successful
That’s the trouble with losing your mind; by the time it’s gone, it’s too late to get it back.
BILL BRYSON

Gone Late Mind Too
The remarkable position in which we find ourselves is that we don’t actually know what we actually know.
BILL BRYSON

Knows Position Remarkable
Americans now get in a car. On average the total walking of an American these days – that’s walking of all types: from car to office, from office to car, around the supermarket and shopping malls – adds up to 1.4 miles a week, barely 350 yards a day.
BILL BRYSON

Around Average Shopping Supermarket Walking
You are going to have a day without even the tiniest of pleasures; you are going to drive across Ohio.
BILL BRYSON

Across Country Even Going Without
When you tell an Iowan a joke, you can see a kind of race going on between his brain and his expression.
BILL BRYSON

Funny Humor Race
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.
BILL BRYSON

Book Pride Travelling Use
Cheapness is a great virtue.
BILL BRYSON

Cheapness Great Virtue
If you can imagine a man having a vasectomy without anesthetic to the sound of frantic sitar-playing, you will have some idea of what popular Turkish music is like.
BILL BRYSON

Frantic Idea Ideas Men Sound Vasectomy

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

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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

Related Topics

Popular Authors

More Bill Bryson Quotes