803 Quotes by Bill Bryson

Never has anyone milked a single thought more vigorously and successfully than he did. The line for which he is remembered was “Work expands to fill the time available for its completion,” still known as Parkinson’s Law. It was first elucidated in a comic essay he wrote for The Economist in 1955 while he was a professor at the University of Malaya in Singapore.

Somehow, from this Gilbert concluded that the Moon’s craters were indeed formed by impacts – in itself quite a radical notion for the time – but.

When you write books for a living, you come to realize that while not all people who write to authors are strange, all people who are strange write to authors.

On the dashboard of our family car is a shallow indentation about the size of a paperback book. If you are looking for somewhere to put your sunglasses or spare change, it is the obvious place, and it works extremely well, I must say, so long as the car is not actually moving. However, as soon as you put the car in motion... everything slides off... It can hold nothing that has not been nailed to it. So I ask you: what then is it for?

In just 200 million years, possibly less, the Earth was essentially formed, though still molten and subject to constant bombardment from all the debris that remained floating about. At.

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.

If a product or enterprise doesn’t constantly reinvent itself, it is superseded, cast aside, abandoned without sentiment in favor of something bigger, newer, and, alas, nearly always uglier.

When they aren’t being incompetent, city officials like to relax with a little corruption.

The biggest component in any human, filling 61 percent of available space, is oxygen. It may seem a touch counterintuitive that we are almost two-thirds composed of an odorless gas.