Quotes from Bill Bryson

As a rule, you knew it was time to eat when you could hear potatoes exploding in the oven. Happily, all this suited my father. His palate only responded to two tastes - burned and ice cream - so everything suited him so long as it was sufficiently dark and not startlingly flavorful. Theirs truly was a marriage made in heaven, for no one could burn food like my mother or eat it like my Dad.

The greatest possible irony would be if in our endless quest to fill our lives with comfort and happiness we created a world that had neither.

The fact is," he says, "we are really no better prepared for a bad outbreak today than we were when Spanish flu killed tens of millions of people a hundred years ago. The reason we haven't had another experience like that isn't because we have been especially vigilant. It's because we have been lucky.

Incidentally, the idea that we use only 10 percent of our brains is a myth. No one knows where the idea came from, but it has never been true or close to true. You may not use it all terribly sensibly, but you employ all your brain in one way or another.

The brain takes a long time to form completely. A teenager's brain is only about 80 percent finished (which may not come as a great surprise to the parents of teenagers

The hardest part was coming to terms with the constant dispiriting discovery that there is always more hill.

Part of the reason people could eat so well was that many foods that we now think of as delicacies were plenteous then. Lobsters bred in such abundance around Britain's coastline that they were fed to prisoners and orphans or ground up for fertilizer.

Ah," he said in a tone of genial wisdom, "a chancellor is rather like a bidet. Everyone is pleased to have one, but no one knows quite what they are for." A chancellor is nominally the head of a university, but in practice has no role, no power, no purpose.

Most people when they nod off look as if they could do with a blanket; I look as if I could do with medical attention. I sleep as if injected with a powerful experimental muscle relaxant.

When Daniel Boone is uneasy, you know it's time to watch your step.

But the thing is, most of the time bad things don't happen. Rocks don't fall. Earthquakes don't occur. New vents don't suddenly open up. For all the instability, it's mostly remarkably and amazingly tranquil.

Indeed, if you look around you on a bus or in a park or cafe or any crowded place, most of the people you see are very probably relatives. When someone boasts to you that he is descended from William the Conqueror or the Mayflower Pilgrims, you should answer at once: Me, too! In the most literal and fundamental sense we are all family.

Indeed, if not told to live -- if not given some kind of active instruction from another cell -- cells automatically kill themselves. Cells need a lot of reassurance.

I had a hangover you could sell to science

It is an intoxicating experience to taste Coca-Cola as if for the first time and to be conveyed to the very brink of orgasm by white bread. Makes all the discomfort worthwhile, if you ask me.

England?" she said with unreserved amazement. "Why do you live in England?" "Because it is nothing like Indianapolis

Imagine having a city full of things that no other city had.

The universe is an amazingly fickle and eventful place, and our existence within is a wonder.

The National Park Service actually has something of a tradition of making things extinct.

We are so used to having a lot of comfort in our lives—to being clean, warm, and well fed—that we forget how recent most of that is. In fact, achieving these things took forever, and then they mostly came in a rush.

On the fourth night, just as I was facing the dismal prospect of finishing my only book and thereafter having nothing to do in the evenings but lie in the half light and listen to Katz snore, I was delighted, thrilled, sublimely gratified to find that some earlier user had left a Graham Greene paperback. If there's one thing the AT teaches, it is low level ecstasy, something we can all do with more of in our lives

It fascinated me that Europeans could at once be so alike – that they could be so universally bookish and cerebral, and drive small cars, and live in little houses in ancient towns, and love soccer, and be relatively unmaterialistic and law-abiding, and have chilly hotel rooms and cosy and inviting places to eat and drink – and yet be so endlessly, unpredictably different from each other as well. I loved the idea that you could never be sure of anything in Europe.

A plumped feather bed may have looked divine, but occupants quickly found themselves sinking into a hard, airless fissure between billowy hills. Support was on a lattice of ropes, which could be tightened with a key when they began to sag (hence the expression sleep tight).

The complexities of the English language are such that even native speakers cannot always communicate effectively, as almost every American learns on his first day in Britain.