“Imagine a single survivor, a lonely fugitive at large on mainland Mauritius at the end of the seventeenth century. Imagine this fugitive as a female. She would have been bulky and flightless and befuddled—but resourceful enough to have escaped and… — David Quammen Copy Share Image
I wrote four novels, but then I realized that the world didn't need me to be a novelist, but the world could use me… — David Quammen Copy Share Image
I am very, very old-fashioned and clumsy. I use those long reporter notebooks. This is what a troglodyte I am. The night before I go off on a trip, I take a scissors, I pull out about four of these things, and I cut off the bottom inch and a half so this thing is only that long. You know… — David Quammen Copy Share
Most Americans know nothing about the African forest, and it seems to them a very scary, spooky dangerous place. I've spent a lot of… — David Quammen Copy Share Image
“Horses aren’t native to Australia. They are exotic, first brought there by European settlers barely more than two centuries ago. Hendra is probably an… — David Quammen Copy Share Image
Viruses have to live somewhere. They can only replicate in living creatures. So, when the Ebola virus disappears between outbreaks, it has to be… — David Quammen Copy Share Image
“People and gorillas, horses and duikers and pigs, monkeys and chimps and bats and viruses: We’re all in this together.” — David Quammen Copy Share Image
Islands are havens and breeding grounds for the unique and anomalous. They are natural laboratories of extravagant evolutionary experimentation. — David Quammen Copy Share Image
“Each outbreak, by this view, represents a local event primarily explicable by a larger cause—the arrival of the wave. The main proponent of the… — David Quammen Copy Share Image
“The Towner paper contained a very interesting statement, as an aside, concerning the five ebolaviruses: “Viruses of each species have genomes that are at… — David Quammen Copy Share Image
I used to read only fiction. Now I don't read much, only occasionally, such as a Cormac McCarthy or a Jim Harrison novel. — David Quammen Copy Share Image
The swallow that hibernates underwater is a creature called yearning. — David Quammen Copy Share Image
“It comes and it goes. But epidemiologists have recognized that, with measles virus, as with other pathogens, there’s a critical minimum size of the… — David Quammen Copy Share Image
