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There is more difference between a zebra and a horse, or between a dolphin and a porpoise, than there is between you and the furry creatures your distant ancestors left behind when they set out to take over the world.

Bill Bryson

Everything that has ever lived, plant or animal, dates its beginning from the same primordial twitch. At some point in an unimaginably distant past, some little bag of chemicals fidgeted to life. It absorbed some nutrients, gently pulsed, had a brief existence.
BILL BRYSON

Animal Moving Past Same
We used to build civilizations. Now we build shopping malls.
BILL BRYSON

Ass Bad Badass Civilization
It is a curious feature of our existance that we come from a planet that is very good at promoting life but even better at extinguishing it.
BILL BRYSON

Curious Good Planets Promoting Very
“Croissant”: However you choose to pronounce it at home, it is perhaps worth nothing that outside the United States, the closer you can come to saying “kwass-ohn,” the sooner you can expect to be presented with one.
BILL BRYSON

Croissants Home United States
When each winding back highway and plump hillside is suddenly and infinitely splashed with every sharp shade that nature can bestow – flaming scarlet, lustrous gold, throbbing vermilion, fiery orange.
BILL BRYSON

Bestow Hobbing Nature Orange Shade Vermilion
We forget just how painfully dim the world was before electricity. A candle, a good candle, provides barely a hundredth of the illumination of a single 100 watt light bulb.
BILL BRYSON

Illumination Light World
You can be a scientist and believe in god: the two can go hand in hand.
BILL BRYSON

Believe Hands Scientist
And before long there will be no more milk in bottles delivered to the doorstep or sleepy rural pubs, and the countryside will be mostly shopping centers and theme parks.
BILL BRYSON

Mean Shopping Sorry
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 which had once been you.
BILL BRYSON

Dust Life Science
We are so used to the notion of our own inevitability as life’s dominant species that it is hard to grasp that we are here only because of timely extraterrestrial bangs and other random flukes.
BILL BRYSON

Doors Four Years
Because time moves more slowly in Kid World … it goes on for decades … It is adult life that is over in a twinkling.
BILL BRYSON

Adults Kids Moving
The one thing we have in common with all other living things is that for nearly four billions years our ancestors have managed to slip through a series of closing doors every time we needed them to.
BILL BRYSON

Billion Closing Common Doors Managed Thing Years
As humans we are doubly lucky, of course: 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. It is a talent we have only barely begun to grasp.
BILL BRYSON

Ability Existence Human Multitude Privilege Singular
There is always a little more toothpaste in the tube. Think about it.
BILL BRYSON

Littles Thinking Toothpaste
That may not be the profoundest of insights to take away from a morning’s outing, but I did get a free doughnut as well, so on balance I guess I’m happy.
BILL BRYSON

Balance Guess Happy Insights Morning Outing Profounded
I still enjoy traveling a lot. I mean, it amazes me that I still get excited in hotel rooms just to see what kind of shampoo they’ve left me.
BILL BRYSON

Kind Mean Rooms

There is more difference between a zebra and a horse, or between a dolphin and a porpoise, than there is between you and the furry creatures your distant ancestors left behind when they set out to take over the world.

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There is more difference between a zebra and a horse, or between a dolphin and a porpoise, than there is between you and the furry creatures your distant ancestors left behind when they set out to take over the world.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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