# Quote — Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything

> Consider the fact that for 3.8 billion years, a period of time older than the Earth's mountains and rivers and oceans, every one of your forebears on both sides has been attractive enough to find a mate, healthy enough to reproduce, and sufficiently blessed by fate and circumstances to live long enough to do so. 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 genetic material to the right partner at the right moment in order to perpetuate the only possible sequence of hereditary combinations that could result -- eventually, astoundingly, and all too briefly -- in you.

- Author: [Bill Bryson](https://www.leafyquotes.com/bill-bryson.md)
- Book: [A Short History of Nearly Everything](https://www.leafyquotes.com/bill-bryson/a-short-history-of-nearly-everything.md)
- Page: 3
- Source: [Wikiquote](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Bill_Bryson#A_Short_History_of_Nearly_Everything_(2003)) ([CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/))
- Quote page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/bill-bryson/a-short-history-of-nearly-everything/consider-the-fact

## More from this book

> In France, a chemist named Pilatre de Rozier tested the flammability of hydrogen by gulping a mouthful and blowing across an open flame, proving at a stroke that hydrogen is indeed explosively combustible and that eyebrows are not necessarily a permanent feature of one's face.

p. 53 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/bill-bryson/a-short-history-of-nearly-everything/in-france-a-chemist.md)

> It is natural human impulse to think of evolution as a long chain of improvements, of a never-ending advance towards largeness and complexity — in a word, towards us. We flatter ourselves. Most of the real diversity in evolution has been small-scale. We large things are just flukes — an interesting side branch.

p. 311 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/bill-bryson/a-short-history-of-nearly-everything/it-is-natural.md)

> Disassemble the cells of a sponge (by passing them through a sieve, for instance), then dump them into a solution, and they will find their way back together and build themselves into a sponge again. You can do this to them over and over, and they will doggedly reassemble because, like you and me and every other living thing, they have one overwhelming impulse: to continue to be.

p. 380 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/bill-bryson/a-short-history-of-nearly-everything/disassemble-the-cells.md)