Bill Bryson: Trending quotes

“99.99 percent of all species that have ever lived are no longer with us.”

“I became quietly seized with that nostalgia that overcomes you when you have reached the middle of your life and your father has recently died and it dawns on you that when he went he took some of you with him.”

“As my father always used to tell me, 'You see, son, there's always someone in the world worse off than you.' And I always used to think, 'So?”

“I mused for a few moments on the question of which was worse, to lead a life so boring that you are easily enchanted or a life so full of stimulus that you are easily bored. But then it occurred to me that musing is a pointless waste of anyone's time, and instead I went off to see if I could find a Baby Ruth candy bar, a far more profitable exercise.”

“It is a slightly arresting notion that if you were to pick yourself apart with tweezers, one atom at a time, you would produce a mound of fine atomic dust, none of which had ever been alive but all of which had once been you.”

“Of all the things I am not very good at, living in the real world is perhaps the most outstanding.”

“We used to build civilizations. Now we build shopping malls.”

“Protons give an atom its identity, electrons its personality.”

“I can't think of anything that excites a greater sense of childlike wonder than to be in a country where you are ignorant of almost everything.”

“When the poet Paul Valery once asked Albert Einstein if he kept a notebook to record his ideas, Einstein looked at him with mild but genuine surprise. "Oh, that's not necessary," he replied. "It's so seldom I have one.”

“Physics is really nothing more than a search for ultimate simplicity, but so far all we have is a kind of elegant messiness.”

“That's the trouble with losing your mind; by the time it's gone, it's too late to get it back.”

“To my mind, the only possible pet is a cow. Cows love you. They will listen to your problems and never ask a thing in return. They will be your friends forever. And when you get tired of them, you can kill and eat them. Perfect.”

“I was heading to Nebraska. Now there's a sentence you don't want to say too often if you can possibly help it.”

“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.”

“Energy is liberated matter, matter is energy waiting to happen.”

“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, and Mary Ellen was proof that even in the Appalachian woods I would not be spared. It became evident from the first moment that she was a rarity.”

“Life just wants to be; but it doesn't want to be much.”

“It is a curious feature of our existance that we come from a planet that is very good at promoting life but even better at extinguishing it.”