For you to be here now, trillions of drifting atoms had somehow to assemble in an intricate and curiously obliging manner to create you. - Bill Bryson

One idea to a sentence is still the best advice that anyone has ever given on writing.

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 they wouldn’t go out. Indeed, even when being beaten vigorously with two hands, as when lodged on the front of one’s sweater, they seemed positively determined not to fail.

For forty years or so this was the world headquarters of conspicuous consumption.