David Quammen

book read lifetime shelf intellectual wallpaper

“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

connected outbreaks pandemic crisis planet ecological medical

“Make no mistake, they are connected, these disease outbreaks coming one after another. And they are not simply happening to us; they represent the unintended results of things we are doing. They reflect the convergence of two forms of crisis on our planet. The first crisis is ecological, the second is medical.”

― David Quammen

serious outbreak planet homo sapiens

“the most serious outbreak on the planet earth is that of the species Homo sapiens.”

― David Quammen

human self-awareness meat

“Among the earliest forms of human self-awareness was the awareness of being meat.”

― David Quammen

darwinian logic evolution happenstance strategy

“By the cold Darwinian logic of natural selection, evolution codifies happenstance into strategy.”

― David Quammen

people gorilla duiker pig monkey chimp bat virus together

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

― David Quammen

ecology paradox large-body long-lived abundant outbreak

“In ecological terms, we are almost paradoxical: large-bodied and long-lived but grotesquely abundant. We are an outbreak.”

― David Quammen

disappointment science gateway insight

“disappointment, in science, is sometimes a gateway to insight.”

― David Quammen

culmination evolution bzarre ingenious lambic pentameter plutoni

"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

kill bear crocodile tiger conquer people exterminate monster

"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