Quotes from Bill Bryson

There is something about the momentum of travel that makes you want to just keep moving, to never stop.

Human beings would split the atom and invent television, nylon, and instant coffee before they could figure out the age of their own planet.

At a conference of sociologists in America in 1977, love was defined as the cognitive-affective state characterized by intrusive and obsessive fantasizing concerning reciprocity of amorant feelings by the object of the amorance. That is jargon - the practice of never calling a spade a spade when you might instead call it a manual earth-restructuring implement - and it is one of the great curses of modern English.

One of the hardest ideas for humans to accept,' he says, 'is that we are not the culmination of anything. There is nothing inevitable about our being here. It is part of our vanity as humans that we tend to think of evolution as a process that, in effect, was programmed to produce us.

In terms of adaptability, humans are pretty amazingly useless.

Christmas tree stands are the work of the devil and they want you dead.

Incidentally, disturbance from cosmic background radiation is something we have all experienced. Tune your television to any channel it doesn't receive, and about 1 percent of the dancing static you see is accounted for by this ancient remnant of the Big Bang. The next time you complain that there is nothing on, remember that you can always watch the birth of the universe.

Bulgaria, I reflected as I walked back to the hotel, isn't a country; it's a near-death experience.

And before long there will be no more milk in bottles delivered to the doorstep or sleepy rural pubs, and the countryside will be mostly shopping centers and theme parks. Forgive me. I don't mean to get upset. But you are taking my world away from me, piece by little piece, and sometimes it just pisses me off. Sorry.

Still, I never really mind bad service in a restaurant. It makes me feel better about not leaving a tip.

Strange as it may seem, wrote Richard Feynman, we understand the distribution of matter in the interior of the Sun far better than we understand the interior of the Earth.

Why is it, I wondered, that old people are always so self-centered and excitable? But I just smiled benignly and stood back, comforted by the thought that soon they would be dead.

Out of the thirty thousand types of edible plants thought to exist on Earth, just eleven—corn, rice, wheat, potatoes, cassava, sorghum, millet, beans, barley, rye, and oats—account for 93 percent of all that humans eat, and every one of them was first cultivated by our Neolithic ancestors.

It is always quietly thrilling to find yourself looking at a world you know well but have never seen from such an angle before.

Everywhere throughout New England you find old, tumbledown field walls, often in the middle of the deepest, most settled- looking woods- a reminder of just how swiftly nature reclaims the land in America.

I hung up again and looked at Katz. What is it with this town? I've blown more intelligent life into a handkerchief.

In the morning I awoke early and experienced that sinking sensation that overcomes you when you first open your eyes and realize that instead of a normal day ahead of you, with its scatterings of simple gratifications, you are going to have a day without even the tiniest of pleasures; you are going to drive across Ohio.

It seems impossible that you could get something from nothing, but the fact that once there was nothing and now there is a universe is evident proof that you can.

Australia is mostly empty and a long way away. Its population is small and its role in the world consequently peripheral. It doesn't have coups, recklessly overfish, arm disagreeable despots, grow coca in provocative quantities, or throw its weight around in a brash and unseemly manner. It is stable and peaceful and good. It doesn't need watching, and so we don't. But I will tell you this: the loss is entirely ours.

it occurred to me that never again would he be seven years, one month and six days old, so we had better catch these moments while we can.

An interesting thing about touch is that the brain doesn't just tell you how something feels, but how it ought to feel. That's why the caress of a lover feels wonderful, but the same touch by a stranger would feel creepy or horrible. It's also why it is so hard to tickle yourself.

When you consider it from a human perspective, and clearly it would be difficult for us to do otherwise, life is an odd thing. It couldn't wait to get going, but then, having gotten going, it seemed in very little hurry to move on.

In my day the principal concerns of university students were sex, smoking dope, rioting and learning. Learning was something you did only when the first three weren't available.

Physicists are atoms' way of thinking about atoms.