David Quammen Quotes

• 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

  Book, Comforting, Intellectual

  David Quammen (2012). “The Boilerplate Rhino: Nature in the Eye of the Beholder”, p.193, Simon and Schuster

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• 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

  Plutonium, Evolution, Culmination

  David Quammen (2014). “Monster Of God: The Man-Eating Predator in the Jungles of History and the Mind”, p.17, Random House

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

  David Quammen

  Self, Meat, Being Me

  David Quammen (2004). “Monster of God: The Man-Eating Predator in the Jungles of History and the Mind”, p.3, W. W. Norton & Company

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• 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

  People, Monsters, Lions

  David Quammen (2004). “Monster of God: The Man-Eating Predator in the Jungles of History and the Mind”, p.254, W. W. Norton & Company

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

  David Quammen

  Unique, Islands, Natural

  David Quammen (1996). “The Song of the Dodo: Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinctions”, Vintage

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• What do we measure when we measure time? The gloomy answer from Hawking, one of our most implacably cheerful scientists, is that we measure entropy. We measure changes and those changes are all for the worse. We measure increasing disorder. Life is hard, says science, and constancy is the greatest of miracles.

  David Quammen

  Life Is Hard, Miracle, Cheerful

  David Quammen (2012). “Wild Thoughts from Wild Places”, p.251, Simon and Schuster

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

  David Quammen

  Logic, Evolution, Cold

  David Quammen (2012). “Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic”, p.17, W. W. Norton & Company

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• 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 damming happens without good reason . . . then it's a tragedy of diminishment for the whole planet, a loss of one more wild thing, leaving Earth just a little flatter and tamer and simpler and uglier than before.

  David Quammen

  Loss, Rivers, Water

  David Quammen (2012). “Wild Thoughts from Wild Places”, p.73, Simon and Schuster

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• 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 as a nonfiction writer.

  David Quammen

  Novelists, Needs, Use

  Source: www.bostonglobe.com

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• 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

  Thoughtful, Long, Battle

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• 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

  Hints, Answers, Shapes

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• 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

  Important, Library, Climate

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• As I started to read nonfiction in the mid '70s, I discovered, holy cow, there was a lot of imaginative nonfiction. Not the kind where people use composite characters and invented quotes. I hate that kind of nonfiction. But imaginative in the sense that good writing and unexpected structure and vivid reporting could be combined with presenting facts.

  David Quammen

  Hate, Writing, Character

  Source: www.bostonglobe.com

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• Evolution as described by Charles Darwin is an scientific theory, abundantly reconfirmed, explaining physical phenomena by physical causes. Intelligent Design is a faith-based initiative in rhetorical argument. Should we teach I.D. in America's public schools? Yes, let's do - not as science, but alongside other spiritual beliefs, such as Islam, Zoroastrianism and the Hindu Idea that Earth rests on Chukwa, the giant turtle.

  David Quammen

  Spiritual, School, Intelligent

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• But private lands development around the periphery of the parks - Grand Teton and Yellowstone - is a crucial issue because if those private lands are transformed from open pastures, meadow, forest land to suburbs, to little ranchettes, to shopping malls, to roads, to Starbucks - if those places are all settled for the benefit of humans, then the elk are not going to be able to migrate in and out of Yellowstone Park anymore. And if the elk can't migrate into the park, then that creates problems for the wolves, for the grizzlies, for a lot of other creatures.

  David Quammen

  Issues, Yellowstone, Land

  "< Is Yellowstone National Park In Danger Of Being 'Loved To Death'?". "Fresh Air" with Terry Gross, www.npr.org. April 18, 2016.

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• The swallow that hibernates underwater is a creature called yearning.

  David Quammen

  Underwater, Yearning, Creatures

  David Quammen (2012). “Wild Thoughts from Wild Places”, p.207, Simon and Schuster

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• Identity is such a crucial affair that one shouldn't rush into it.

  David Quammen

  Animal, Identity, Wildlife

  David Quammen (2012). “The Flight of the Iguana: A Sidelong View of Science and Nature”, p.60, Simon and Schuster

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• 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

  Fiction, Used, Novel

  Source: www.bostonglobe.com

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• There was a very important superintendent of Yellowstone, a man who was involved in the founding of the National Park Service itself, Horace Albright. And he became superintendent, which is the boss of Yellowstone Park, in 1919 - from 1919 to 1929. Later, he was director of the park service itself. Albright embraced the idea that in order for the national parks - and Yellowstone in particular - to have support from the American people and from politicians, there needed to be wildlife as spectacle.

  David Quammen

  Men, Yellowstone, Order

  Source: www.npr.org

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• And so in 1975, the grizzly bear was put on, as I said - on the endangered species list as threatened. And new measures were taken, for instance, bear-proofing garbage, creating new regulations to - essentially to try and keep people and people's food away from the bears, let the bears adjust to eating the abundant wild food that's available in Yellowstone and allow them to be more wild, to be independent of humans as sources of foods for the good of both sides. And that has been quite successful.

  David Quammen

  Taken, Independent, Successful

  "Is Yellowstone National Park In Danger Of Being 'Loved To Death'?". "Fresh Air" with David Bianculli, www.npr.org. June 10, 2016.

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• 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 expressing their condescension toward him in particular, that criticism also reflected a common attitude that fact-gathering, not theory, was the proper business of all naturalists.

  David Quammen

  Attitude, Criticism, Gathering

  David Quammen (1996). “The Song of the Dodo: Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinctions”, Vintage

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• Mathematics to me is like a language I don’t speak though I admire its literature in translation.

  David Quammen

  Literature, Language, Speak

  "Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic". Book by David Quammen, 2012.

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• Islands are where species go to die.

  David Quammen

  Islands, Species, Dies

  "The Song of the Dodo: Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinctions". Book by David Quammen, 1996.

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• [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 scientists mean when they talk about a theory: not a dreamy and unreliable speculation, but an explanatory statement that fits the evidence. They embrace such an explanation confidently but provisionally - taking it as their best available view of reality, at least unil some severely conflicting data or some better explanation might come along.

  David Quammen

  Mean, Reality, Views

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• If you are lying in a tent in the Congo jungle, you don't want to be reading about rainforest biology. You want to be in a distant world.

  David Quammen

  Lying, Reading, World

  Source: www.bostonglobe.com

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