Bill Bryson

"Not one of your pertinent ancestors was squashed, devoured, drowned, starved, stranded, stuck fast, untimely wounded, or otherwise deflected from its life's quest of delivering a tiny charge of geneti…"

"If this book has a lesson, it is that we are awfully lucky to be here-and by 'we' I mean every living thing. To attain any kind of life in this universe of ours appears to be quite an achievement. As …"

"In those days kitchen matches were heavy-duty implements—more like signal flares than the weedy sticks we get today. You could strike them on any hard surface and fling them at least fifteen feet and …"

"I assume he was descended from apes like all the rest of us, but clearly in his case it had been a fairly gentle slope."

"America was entering the age not just of the automobile but of the retarded attention span."

"A friend Alan and I ended up in an Outback pub in a place called Daly Waters and apparently, he says, in the course of this very lively evening we spent there I offered to do a house swap with a famil…"

"It is a slightly arresting notion that if you were to pick yourself apart with tweezers, one atom at a time, you would produce a mound of fine atomic dust, none of which had ever been alive but all of…"

"The thing about the Army Corps of Engineers is that they don’t build things very well."