Top 85 David Quammen Quotes
#2. Islands are havens and breeding grounds for the unique and anomalous. They are natural laboratories of extravagant evolutionary experimentation.
David Quammen
#3. Hamer was especially interested in why diseases such as influenza, diphtheria, and measles seem to mount into major outbreaks in a cyclical pattern - rising to a high case count, fading away, rising again after a certain interval
David Quammen
#4. A high jeopardy of extinction comes with territory. Islands are where species go to die.
David Quammen
#5. 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 book, resting unopened in its slot on a shelf, full of majestic potentiality, is the most comforting sort of intellectual wallpaper.
David Quammen
#6. People and gorillas, horses and duikers and pigs, monkeys and chimps and bats and viruses: We're all in this together.
David Quammen
#7. By the cold Darwinian logic of natural selection, evolution codifies happenstance into strategy.
David Quammen
#8. In ecological terms, we are almost paradoxical: large-bodied and long-lived but grotesquely abundant. We are an outbreak.
David Quammen
#9. Disappointment, in science, is sometimes a gateway to insight.
David Quammen
#10. Identity is such a crucial affair that one shouldn't rush into it
David Quammen
#11. He hoped these students would learn how to be at home in the desert, not how to conquer it; and he hoped that, in the process, they might discover the spiritual value of quietude.
David Quammen
#12. Humanity badly needs things that are big and fearsome and homicidally wild. Counterintuitive as it may seem, we need to preserve those few remaining beasts, places, and forces of nature capable of murdering us with sublime indifference.
David Quammen
#13. 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 time in the forests of central Africa. I know they're beautiful places that contain a lot of different kinds of creatures, including some that carry Ebola.
David Quammen
#14. 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
#15. This form of interspecies leap is common, not rare; about 60 percent of all human infectious diseases currently known either cross routinely or have recently crossed between other animals and us.
David Quammen
#16. When a pathogen leaps from some nonhuman animal into a person, and succeeds there in establishing itself as an infectious presence, sometimes causing illness or death, the result is a zoonosis.
David Quammen
#17. Not only are islands impoverished relative to the mainlands, but small islands are more severely impoverished than large ones. That bit of insight became famed as the species-area relationship.
David Quammen
#18. 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 come to address its implications, as these thoughtful, battle-tested authors attempt to do. The time has long since come.
David Quammen
#20. Ideas - and where facts were scarce, directive questions. Other
David Quammen
#21. 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 well to living in humans, replicating in humans, and perhaps transmitting from human to human.
David Quammen
#22. Penicillin works by preventing bacteria from building their cell walls. So do its synthetic alternatives, such as amoxicillin. Tetracycline works by interfering with the internal metabolic processes by which bacteria manufacture new proteins for cell growth and replication.
David Quammen
#23. The swallow that hibernates underwater is a creature called yearning.
David Quammen
#24. Nor are we the culmination of evolution, except in the sense that there has never been another species so bizarrely ingenious that it could create both iambic pentameter and plutonium.
David Quammen
#25. Herpes B is a very rare infection in humans but a nasty one, with a case fatality rate of almost 70 percent among those few dozen people infected during the twentieth century (before recent breakthroughs in antiviral pharmaceutics) and almost 50 percent even since then. When
David Quammen
#26. And hopefully nothing will happen. But of course, as she well knew, something always does happen. It's just a question of what and when.
David Quammen
#27. Their result was a model-generated prediction: Given this rate of transmission, given that rate of recovery, given those unrelated mortalities, then . . . an intermediate grade of virulence should come to predominate. Son of a gun, it matched what had happened.
David Quammen
#28. When the Next Big One comes, we can guess, it will likely conform to the same perverse pattern, high infectivity preceding notable symptoms. That will help it to move through cities and airports like an angel of death.
David Quammen
#29. Mad cow disease is caused by a prion, a weirdly folded protein molecule that triggers weird folding in other molecules, like Kurt Vonnegut's infectious form of water, ice-nine, in his great early novel Cat's Cradle.
David Quammen
#30. Then a very large komodo breaks into view, spooked by our trespass, and scrambles up the vertical face of the bluff, like an alligator scaling a four-story building.
David Quammen
#31. Results "are no good unless they answer (or can be made to seem to answer, or can be twisted and wrenched and piled into odd shapes until they hint at being somehow perhaps on the verge or answering) a question that someone might conceivably want asked."
David Quammen
#32. 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 world and kill tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of people. That's what I think of as the next big one.
David Quammen
#33. It testified, I suppose, to the genderless ferocity of her mind." "Why
David Quammen
#34. A few monkeys and parrots were loose on the wreck, clambering hysterically toward nowhere. He saw several animals disappear into the flames.
David Quammen
#35. Among the most important things to remember about evolution - and about its primary mechanism, natural selection, as limned by Darwin and his successors - is that it doesn't have purposes. It only has results. To
David Quammen
#36. Appearances have enormous importance, Mr. Kessler. The creation and maintenance of appearances. Appearances govern.
David Quammen
#37. Others are new and inexplicably sporadic, claiming a few victims (as Hendra does) or a few hundred (Ebola) in this place or that, and then disappearing for years.
David Quammen
#38. Theory in any branch of science entails a risk of detachment from reality
Quammen, David
#39. Two aspects of a virus in action: transmissibility and virulence. These
David Quammen
#40. The most serious outbreak on the planet earth is that of the species Homo sapiens.
David Quammen
#41. Every species has come into existence coincident both in space and time with a pre-existing closely allied species. Description or law, it challenged the theory of special creation and bruited the idea of evolution in a tone of thunderous innuendo.
David Quammen
#42. One of the things that's particularly nefarious about Ebola is that it continues to live in a dead person for some period of time after death. A person who's been dead for a day or two may still be seething with Ebola virus.
David Quammen
#43. a mutation in that strain might have made it especially aggressive, efficient, transmissible, and fierce.
David Quammen
#44. What are they called? Sprackles, shakums, edible sequins, glossy sugar deedeebobs, I don't know. Instead of sprinkling them on a cookie, I sprinkle them on Angel de la Guarda.
David Quammen
#45. Viruses face four basic challenges: how to get from one host to another, how to penetrate a cell within that host, how to commandeer the cell's equipment and resources for producing multiple copies of itself, and how to get back out - out of the cell, out of the host, on to the next. A
David Quammen
#47. The downside was that hospital staff took the first big blasts of secondary infection; the upside was that those blasts generally weren't emitted by people still feeling healthy enough to ride a bus or a subway to work. This was an enormously consequential factor in the SARS episode -
David Quammen
#48. Numbers can be an important aspect of understanding infectious disease. Take measles. At first glance, it might seem nonmathematical. It's caused by a paramyxovirus
David Quammen
#49. Know that walking into a small woodlot," he wrote, "is riskier than walking into a nearby large, extensive forest.
David Quammen
#50. Advisory: If your husband catches an ebolavirus, give him food and water and love and maybe prayers but keep your distance, wait patiently, hope for the best-- and, if he dies, don't clean out his bowels by hand. Better to step back, blow a kiss, and burn the hut.
David Quammen
#51. It wasn't a petty squabble. It was a big squabble, in which pettiness played no small part.
David Quammen
#52. 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 old virus, according to the runic evidence of its genome, as read by molecular evolutionists.
David Quammen
#53. Convincing biologic evidence exists for symptomatic chronic B. burgdorferi infection in patients after recommended treatment regimens for Lyme disease.
David Quammen
#54. Britain's Advisory Committee on Dangerous Pathogens had lately reclassified herpes B into biohazard level 4, placing it in the elite company of Ebola, Marburg, and the virus that causes Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever. National
David Quammen
#55. MacArthur himself was more interested in the similarities among phenomena, because similarities reveal the workings of regular processes ... I've already quoted MacArthur's statement that to do science is to search for repeated patterns, not simply to accumulate facts.
Quammen, David
#56. I thought 'The Hot Zone' was fascinating, mesmerizing. It's one of the things that got me interested in Ebola.
David Quammen
#57. 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 their place, until you've exterminated their resident monsters.
David Quammen
#58. A plate of Ebola virions mixed with Hendra virions would resemble capellini in a light sauce of capers.
David Quammen
#59. 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 in some reservoir host, presumably some species of animal.
David Quammen
#60. 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 still shines from her hazel eyes.
David Quammen
#61. Among the earliest forms of human self-awareness was the awareness of being meat.
David Quammen
#62. If the virus had arrived in a different sort of big city - more loosely governed, full of poor people, lacking first-rate medical institutions - it might have escaped containment and burned through a
David Quammen
#63. Alternatively, anyone who favors Intelligent Design in lieu of evolution might pause to wonder why God devoted so much of His intelligence to designing malarial parasites.
David Quammen
#64. Mathematics to me is like a language I don't speak though I admire its literature in translation.
David Quammen
#65. The basic point is so important I'll repeat it: RNA viruses mutate profligately.
David Quammen
#66. 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 of which we're already so aware.
David Quammen
#67. You can't take a knife on a plane anymore, but you can get on carrying a virus.
David Quammen
#68. SIR model, representing a flow of individuals, during the course of an outbreak, through those three classes I mentioned earlier: from susceptible (S) to infected (I) to recovered (R). Anderson
David Quammen
#69. The fossil record shows that no other species of large-bodied beast - above the size of an ant, say, or of an Antarctic krill - has ever achieved anything like such abundance as the abundance of humans on Earth right now.
David Quammen
#70. We should recognize that they reflect things that we're doing, not just things that are happening to us. We should understand that, although some of the human-caused factors may seem virtually inexorable, others are within our control.
David Quammen
#71. R0 explains and, to some limited degree, it predicts. It defines the boundary between a small cluster of weird infections in a tropical village somewhere, flaring up, burning out, and a global pandemic. It came from George MacDonald.
David Quammen
#72. I was a prodigy who learned how difficult writing was only after getting published. I paid my dues later.
David Quammen
#73. But here's a bit of spoilsport historical reality: It wasn't the finches that inspired Darwin, it was the Mockingbirds.
David Quammen
#74. Two men, on opposite sides of the world, had made the same great discovery at the same time.
David Quammen
#75. There's a belief in some cultures that if a person experiences good fortune in financial terms and does not share the good fortune, when that person becomes ill with a mysterious fever and dies, people tend to say: 'Aha! It was because he didn't share. It was the spirits who brought him down.'
David Quammen
#76. The order Chiroptera (the "hand-wing" creatures) encompasses 1,116 species, which amounts to 25 percent of all the recognized species of mammals. To say again: One in every four species of mammal is a bat. Such
David Quammen
#77. Ecological disturbance causes diseases to emerge. Shake a tree, and things fall out. Nearly all zoonotic diseases result from infection by one of six kinds of pathogen: viruses, bacteria, fungi, protists (a group of
David Quammen
#78. Sir Peter Medawar, an eminent British biologist who received a Nobel Prize the same year as Macfarlane Burnet, defined a virus as a piece of bad news wrapped up in a protein.
David Quammen
#79. The elk are the most abundant large herbivores in the Yellowstone ecosystem. There are thousands and thousands of them. They migrate in and out. And those migration routes need to stay open.
David Quammen
#80. He succeeded in staying out of exactly and only those forms of postadolescent trouble that were not winked at, sating himself with those that were.
David Quammen
#81. Onward we climb. The upper slope is a crust of friable lava. It crunches like peanut brittle beneath our steps.
David Quammen
#82. Lyme disease, psittacosis, Q fever: These three differ wildly in their particulars but share two traits in common. They are all zoonotic and they are all bacterial. They stand as reminders that not every bad, stubborn, new bug is a virus.
David Quammen
#83. Their most telling improvement involved a fundamental parameter: population size of the hosts.
David Quammen
#84. The first rule of a successful parasite? Myxoma's success in Australia suggests something different from that nugget of conventional wisdom I mentioned above. It's not Don't kill your host. It's Don't burn your bridges until after you've crossed them.
David Quammen
#85. Its evolutionary adaptability is largely gone. Ecologically, it has become moribund. Sheer chance, among other factors, is working against it. The toilet of its destiny has been flushed.
David Quammen
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