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 BrysonPeople don't talk like this, theytalklikethis. Syllables, words, sentences run together like a watercolour left in the rain. To understand what anyone is saying to us we must separate these noises into words and the words into sentences so that we might in our turn issue a stream of mixed sounds in response.
Bill BrysonOut of the thirty thousand types of edible plants thought to exist on Earth, just elevenโcorn, rice, wheat, potatoes, cassava, sorghum, millet, beans, barley, rye, and oatsโaccount for 93 percent of all that humans eat, and every one of them was first cultivated by our Neolithic ancestors.
Bill Bryson