David Quammen Quotes

18 quotes in 426 categories

• Wallace's sales agent, back in London, heard mutterings from some naturalists that young Mr. Wallace ought to quit theorizing and stick to gathering facts. Besides…
• [Theory is] an explanation that has been confirmed to such a degree, by observation and experiment, that knowledgeable experts accept it as fact. That's what…
• Identity is such a crucial affair that one shouldn't rush into it.
• Of course anyone who truly loves books buys more of them than he or she can hope to read in one fleeting lifetime. A good…
• Among the earliest forms of human self-awareness was the awareness of being meat.
• The swallow that hibernates underwater is a creature called yearning.
• Islands are where species go to die.
• Kill off the sacred bear. Kill off the ancestral crocodile. Kill off the myth-wrapped tiger. Kill off the lion. You haven't conquered a people, or…
• Heatstroke is an important and useful addition to the library on climate change, bringing insights from deep-time ecological research to help illuminate the dire forecasts…
• To drown a river beneath its own impounded water, by damming, is to kill what it was and to settle for something else. When the…
• By the cold Darwinian logic of natural selection, evolution codifies happenstance into strategy.
• Whether you like the label 'Anthropocene' or not, whether you find the prospect of what it signifies inevitable or appalling (or both), the time has…
• Islands are havens and breeding grounds for the unique and anomalous. They are natural laboratories of extravagant evolutionary experimentation.
• 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…
• I was a prodigy who learned how difficult writing was only after getting published. I paid my dues later.
• The more cases of Ebola infection we have, the more chances there are for the virus to mutate in a particular way that adapts it…
• Viruses have to live somewhere. They can only replicate in living creatures. So, when the Ebola virus disappears between outbreaks, it has to be living…
• On April 3, 2014, Jane Goodall turned 80. The iconic blond ponytail has gone gray, but the sparkle of intelligence, sly humor, and fierce dedication…

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