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.

— Bill Bryson

Bill Bryson Quotes

One planet, one experiment.” If.

— Bill Bryson

A. L. Rowse – who, it must be said, never allowed an absence of certainty to get in the way of a conclusion – in 1973 identified the dark lady as Emilia Bassano, daughter of one of the queen’s musicians, and, with a certain thrust of literary jaw, asserted that his conclusions “cannot be impugned, for they are the answer,” even though they are unsupported by anything that might reasonably be termed proof.

— Bill Bryson

They were most peculiar. And they eat pizza pie.” “For breakfast?” “No, for lunch and dinner. But it’s not a pie at all, it’s a kind of bread with tomato sauce and cheese on it.” “Sounds dreadful.

— Bill Bryson

Rather, space curves, in a way that allows it to be boundless but finite.

— Bill Bryson

However senior or accomplished, they were not allowed into the college’s senior common room but instead had to take their meals in a more utilitarian chamber.

— Bill Bryson

I know we’re not the first to discover this,’ Gene Cernan radioed back from about 29,000 kilometres, ’but we’d like to confirm, from the crew of America, that the world is round.

— Bill Bryson

I mentioned my observation that the world seems to be filling up with imbeciles. They explained to me that this is simply an affliction of age. The older you get the more it seems the world belongs to other people.

— Bill Bryson

When Jefferson’s father died in 1757, he left a library of forty-two books, and that was regarded as pretty impressive. A library of four hundred books – the number that John Harvard left at his death – was considered so colossal that they named Harvard College after him. Over the course of his life, Harvard had acquired books at the rate of about twelve a year.

— Bill Bryson

Would Giovanni da Verrazano think being eaten by cannibals a reasonable price to pay for having his name attached to a toll bridge between Brooklyn and Staten Island? I suspect not.

— Bill Bryson

But if you’re not giving the kids the lessons because the parents can’t help them, then those kids, when they become parents, won’t have the core skills either, will they?

— Bill Bryson

Whatever the losses in warmth and comfort, the gains in space proved irresistible. So the development of the fireplace became one of the great breakthroughs in domestic history: they allowed people to lay boards across the beams and create a whole new world upstairs.

— Bill Bryson

But perhaps nothing speaks more clearly for the absurdities of English pronunciation than that the word for the study of pronunciation in English, orthoepy, can itself be pronounced two ways.

— Bill Bryson

Romanians often claim to have the language that most closely resembles ancient Latin. But in fact, according to Mario Pei, if you wish to hear what ancient Latin sounded like, you should listen to Lugudorese, an Italic dialect spoken in central Sardinia, which in many respects is unchanged from the Latin of 1,500 years ago.

— Bill Bryson

Mars-sized object slammed into Earth, blowing out enough material to create the Moon from the debris.

— Bill Bryson

Homo erectus was the first to hunt, the first to use fire, the first to fashion complex tools, the first to leave evidence of campsites, the first to look after the weak and frail.

— Bill Bryson

We enjoy not only the privilege of existence, but also the singular ability to appreciate it and even, in a multitude of ways, to make it better.

— Bill Bryson

We live on a planet that more or less has an infinite capacity to surprise.

— Bill Bryson

I took a place in one of the lines. Progress.

— Bill Bryson

Far from marking the outer edge of the solar system, as those schoolroom maps so cavalierly imply, Pluto is barely one-fifty-thousandth of the way.

— Bill Bryson

I love the way the Italians park. You turn any street corner in Rome and it looks as if you’ve just missed a parking competition for blind people.

— Bill Bryson
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