Bill Bryson citations

“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.”

“Of all the things I am not very good at, living in the real world is perhaps the most outstanding. I am constantly filled with wonder at the number of things that other people do without any evident difficulty that are pretty much beyond me.”

“As the saying goes, it takes all kinds to make the world go around, though perhaps some shouldn't go quite so far around it as others.”

“18th century scientists, the French in particular, seldom did things simply if an absurdly demanding alternative was available.”

“Isn´t it strange how wealth is always wasted on the rich?”

“Geologists are never at a loss for paperweights.”

“When you sit in a chair, you are not actually sitting there, but levitating above it at a height of one angstrom (a hundred millionth of a centimetre), your electrons and its electrons implacably opposed to any closer intimacy.”

“I wanted to quit and to do this forever, sleep in a bed and in a tent, see what was over the next hill and never see a hill again. All of this all at once, every moment, on the trail or off.”

“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.”

“The taipan is the one to watch out for. It is the most poisonous snake on Earth, with a lunge so swift and a venom so potent that your last mortal utterance is likely to be: "I say, is that a sn--”

“I come from Des Moines. Somebody had to.”