Best-selling American author of funny travel books Bill Bryson has been delighting readers all over the world since the late 1980s. Bryson gained recognition in the United Kingdom upon the publication of Notes from a Small Island (1995), which explores Britain and its television series. He was widely praised again for A Short History of Nearly Everything, which was published in 2003 and which focuses on science.
Whether he is writing about America or exploring Australia, Bill Bryson is distinguished for his sense of humour and wit, delivering always funny yet thought observations and theories about the places he visits. Here are some of his best quotes:
“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.” - The Lost Continent
“If there’s one thing the AT teaches, it is low-level ecstasy-something we could all do with more of in our lives.” - A Walk in the Woods
“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.” - A Walk in the Woods
“Black bears rarely attack. But here’s the thing. Sometimes they do. All bears are agile, cunning and immensely strong, and they are always hungry. If they want to kill you and eat you, they can, and pretty much whenever they want. That doesn’t happen often, but-and here is the absolutely salient point-once would be enough.” - A Walk in the Woods
“That’s the glory of foreign travel, as far as I am concerned. I don’t want to know what people are talking about. 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. 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.” - Neither Here Nor There
“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.” - A Walk in the Woods
“Distance changes utterly when you take the world on foot. A mile becomes a long way, two miles literally considerable, 10 miles whopping, 50 miles at the very limits of conception. The world, you realize, is enormous in a way that only you and a small community of fellow hikers know. Planetary scale is your little secret.
Life takes on a neat simplicity, too. Time ceases to have any meaning. When it is dark, you go to bed, and when it is light again you get up, and everything in between is just in between. It’s quite wonderful, really.” - A Walk in the Woods
“I sat on a toilet watching the water run thinking what an odd thing tourism is. You fly off to a strange land, eagerly abandoning all the comforts of home and then expend vast quantities of time and money in a largely futile effort to recapture the comforts you wouldn’t have lost if you hadn’t left home in the first place.” - Neither Here Nor There
“I ordered a coffee and a little something to eat and savored the warmth and dryness. Somewhere in the background Nat King Cole sang a perky tune. I watched the rain beat down on the road outside and told myself that one day this would be 20 years ago.” – Notes From A
“What is it about maps? I could look at them all day, earnestly studying the names of towns and villages I have never heard of and will never visit, tracing the course of obscure rivers, checking elevations, consulting the marginal notes to see what a little circle with a flag on it signifies (a Burg or Schloss) and what’s the difference between a pictogram of an airplane with a circle around it and one without (one is a Flughafen, the other a Flugplatz), issuing small profound ‘Hmmmm’s’ and nodding my head gravely without having the faintest idea why.” - Neither Here Nor There
“In terms of adaptability, humans are pretty amazingly useless.” - A Short History of Nearly Everything
“To tell you the truth, I’m amazed we’ve come this far,” he said, and I agreed. We had hiked 500 miles, a million and a quarter steps, since setting off from Amicalola. We had grounds to be proud. We were real hikers now. We had shit in the woods and slept with bears. We had become, we would forever be, mountain men.” - A Walk in the Woods
“Traveling is more fun-hell, life is more fun-if you can treat it as a series of impulses.” – Neither Here Nor There
“A significant fraction of thru-hikers reach Katahdin, then turn around and start back to Georgia. They just can’t stop walking, which kind of makes you wonder.” - A Walk in the Woods
“Most of the time I am sunk in thought, but at some point on each walk there comes a moment when I look up and notice, with a kind of first-time astonishment, the amazing complex delicacy of the words, the casual ease with which elemental things come together to form a composition that is-whatever the season, wherever I put my besotted gaze-perfect.” - A Walk in the Woods
“Perhaps it’s my natural pessimism, but it seems that an awfully large part of travel these days is to see things while you still can.” - In a Sunburned Country
“There is something about the momentum of travel that makes you want to just keep moving, to never stop.” - Neither Here Nor There
“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.” - The Lost Continent