David Quammen

I wrote four novels, but then I realized that the world didn't need me to be a novelist, but the world could…

— David Quammen

I am very, very old-fashioned and clumsy. I use those long reporter notebooks. This is what a troglodyte I am. The night…

— David Quammen

Most Americans know nothing about the African forest, and it seems to them a very scary, spooky dangerous place. I've spent a…

— David Quammen

“Horses aren’t native to Australia. They are exotic, first brought there by European settlers barely more than two centuries ago. Hendra is…

— David Quammen

Viruses have to live somewhere. They can only replicate in living creatures. So, when the Ebola virus disappears between outbreaks, it has…

— David Quammen

“People and gorillas, horses and duikers and pigs, monkeys and chimps and bats and viruses: We’re all in this together.”

— David Quammen

Islands are havens and breeding grounds for the unique and anomalous. They are natural laboratories of extravagant evolutionary experimentation.

— David Quammen

“Each outbreak, by this view, represents a local event primarily explicable by a larger cause—the arrival of the wave. The main proponent…

— David Quammen

“The Towner paper contained a very interesting statement, as an aside, concerning the five ebolaviruses: “Viruses of each species have genomes that…

— David Quammen

I used to read only fiction. Now I don't read much, only occasionally, such as a Cormac McCarthy or a Jim Harrison…

— David Quammen

The swallow that hibernates underwater is a creature called yearning.

— David Quammen

“It comes and it goes. But epidemiologists have recognized that, with measles virus, as with other pathogens, there’s a critical minimum size…

— David Quammen

Whether you like the label 'Anthropocene' or not, whether you find the prospect of what it signifies inevitable or appalling (or both),…

— David Quammen

Ebola isn't a respiratory virus. It doesn't spread through the airborne route. So it's not likely to spread like wildfire around the…

— David Quammen

I'm a white, middle-class male who had a happy childhood in Ohio. The world does not need me to be a novelist.

— David Quammen

“An amplifier host is a creature in which a virus or other pathogen replicates—and from which it spews—with extraordinary abundance. Some aspect…

— David Quammen

We're shaking loose viruses and dislodging them from their natural ecological limitations, places where they aren't very abundant and have competition, even…

— David Quammen

If you're Maasai Mara National Park in Kenya, if you're in Serengeti National Park in Tanzania, you don't get out of your…

— David Quammen

You can't take a knife on a plane anymore, but you can get on carrying a virus.

— David Quammen

“problem peaked in 1952 with an outbreak that killed more than three thousand victims, many of them children, and left twenty-one thousand…

— David Quammen

“Ecological disturbance causes diseases to emerge. Shake a tree, and things fall out. Nearly all zoonotic diseases result from infection by one…

— David Quammen

“Humanity badly needs things that are big and fearsome and homicidally wild. Counterintuitive as it may seem, we need to preserve those…

— David Quammen

To drown a river beneath its own impounded water, by damming, is to kill what it was and to settle for something…

— David Quammen

“Numbers can be an important aspect of understanding infectious disease. Take measles. At first glance, it might seem nonmathematical. It’s caused by…

— David Quammen

“Hamer was especially interested in why diseases such as influenza, diphtheria, and measles seem to mount into major outbreaks in a cyclical…

— David Quammen