Quotes by Bill Bryson

“For a long time it puzzled me how something so expensive, so leading edge, could be so useless, and then it occurred to me that a computer is a stupid machine with the ability to do incredibly smart things, while computer programmers are smart people with the ability to do incredibly stupid things. They are, in short, a perfect match.”

“I have long known that it is part of Gods plan for me to spend a little time with each of the most stupid people on earth.”

“And I find chopsticks frankly distressing. Am I alone in thinking it odd that a people ingenious enough to invent paper, gunpowder, kites and any number of other useful objects, and who have a noble history extending back 3,000 years havent yet worked out that a pair of knitting needles is no way to capture food?”

“Among the many thousands of things that I have never been able to understand, one in particular stands out. That is the question of who was the first person who stood by a pile of sand and said, You know, I bet if we took some of this and mixed it with a little potash and heated it, we could make a material that would be solid and yet transparent. We could call it glass. Call me obtuse, but you could stand me on a beach till the end of time and never would it occur to me to try to make it into windows.”

“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.”

“If you can imagine a man having a vasectomy without anesthetic to the sound of frantic sitar-playing, you will have some idea what popular Turkish music is like.”

“He had the sort of face that makes you realize God does have a sense of humor.”

“The average Southerner has the speech patterns of someone slipping in and out of consciousness. I can change my shoes and socks faster than most people in Mississippi can speak a sentence.”

“If automobiles had followed the same development cycle as the computer, a Rolls-Royce would today cost $100, get a million miles per gallon, and explode once a year, killing everyone inside”

“Beware of computer programmers that carry screwdrivers.”

“The whole of the global economy is based on supplying the cravings of two per cent of the worlds population.”

“The remarkable position in which we find ourselves is that we dont actually know what we actually know.”

“Bostons freeway system is insane. It was clearly designed by a person who had spent his childhood crashing toy trains.”

“To an American the whole purpose of living, the one constant confirmation of continued existence, is to cram as much sensual pleasure as possible into ones mouth more or less continually. Gratification, instant and lavish, is a birthright.”

“English grammar is so complex and confusing for the one very simple reason that its rules and terminology are based on Latin -- a language with which it has precious little in common. In Latin, to take one example, it is not possible to split an infinitive. So in English, the early authorities decided, it should not be possible to split an infinitive either. But there is no reason why we shouldnt, any more than we should forsake instant coffee and air travel because they werent available to the Romans. Making English grammar conform to Latin rules is like asking people to play baseball using the rules of football. It is a patent absurdity. But once this insane notion became established, grammarians found themselves having to draw up ever more complicated and circular arguments to accommodate the inconsistencies.”

“We are so used to the notion of our own inevitability as lifes dominant species that it is hard to grasp that we are only here because of timely extraterrestrial bangs and other random flukes.”

“More than 300 million people in the world speak English and the rest, it sometimes seems, try to.”

“My first rule of consumerism is never to buy anything you cant make your children carry.”

“Programmer - an organism that turns coffee into software.”

“There are things you just cant do in life. You cant beat the phone company, you cant make a waiter see you until hes ready to see you, and you cant go home again.”