Bill Bryson Quotes

Bears are simultaneously so graceful and so strong. Bears know who they are, but they often don’t know who you are, which is why they kill you.

I was learning to track rhinoceroses in Africa and tracked right up on an animal that really I thought was going to kill me.

If you run from a bear, it'll chase you. And they can run fast.

It is a hard thing when one has shot sixty-five lions or more, as I have in the course of my life, that the sixty-sixth should chew your leg like a quid of tobacco. It breaks the routine of the thing, and putting other considerations aside, I am an orderly man and don't like that. This is by the way.

...if you fall into a lion's pit, the reason the lion will tear you to pieces is not because it's hungry-be assured, zoo animals are amply fed-or because it's bloodthirsty, but because you've invaded it's territory.

3. There are bears and there are small dogs. Be strong like bear! If they take out your teeth, sit on the dogs. Bears always forget they can just sit on the dogs. Sit on the dogs.

If the bears don't get you, it's home.

If you hit a kangaroo in the street and you have to pull out on the side of the road, it can get back up and murder you.

All beasts of prey are strong or treacherous.

I remember lying in the snow, a small red spot of warm going cold, surrounded by wolves.

It was only when Shona, in sheer fury, turned the carnivorous sheep among them that they moved. They ran, some of them with charming little white sheep attached to their legs or backsides and the rest shouting about monsters.

The wolf attacks with his fang, the bull with his horn.

If you see me in a fight with a bear, pray for the bear.

You can free things from alien or accidental laws, but not from the laws of their own nature. You may, if you like, free a tiger from his bars; but do not free him from his stripes.

The same chemicals were used in the cooking as were used on the composition of her own being: only those which caused the most violent reaction, contradiction, and teasing, the refusal to answer questions but the love of putting them, and all the strong spices of human relationship which bore a relation to black pepper, paprika, soybean sauce, ketchup and red peppers.

Cats do not abide by the laws of nature.

This face is a dog's snout sniffing for garbage, snakes nest in that mouth, I hear the sibilant threat.

Sheep are not the docile, pleasant creatures of the pastoral idyll. Any countryman will tell you that. They are sly, occasionally vicious, pathologically stupid. The lenient shepherd may find his flock unruly, definant. I cannot afford to be lenient.

When among wild beasts, if they menace you, be a wild beast.

I paid a worker at New York's zoo to re-open it just for me and Robin (his wife). When we got to the gorilla cage there was 1 big Silverback gorilla there just bullying all the other gorillas. They were so powerful but their eyes were like an innocent infant. I offered the attendant $10,000 to open the cage and let smash that silverback's snotbox! He declined.

It would certainly would be great to see more films featuring the black family and showing that we are capable of having that unit strong and present and beautiful, because that's so much of who we really are.

Nature's law says that the strong must prevent the weak from living, but only in a newspaper article or textbook can this be packaged into a comprehensible thought. In the soup of everyday life, in the mixture of minutia from which human relations are woven, it is not a law. It is a logical incongruity when both strong and weak fall victim to their mutual relations, unconsciously subservient to some unknown guiding power that stands outside of life, irrelevant to man.

[About gorillas] You take these fine, regal animals. How many (human) fathers have the same sense of paternity? How many human mothers are more caring? The family structure is unbelievably strong.

Happy the hare at morning, for she cannot read The hunter's waking thoughts.

They had a... dog called Bluey. A know psychopath, Bluey would attack himself if nothing else was available.