Top 60 David Quammen Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “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

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2. “Ecological disturbance causes diseases to emerge. Shake a tree, and things fall out.”

— David Quammen

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

— David Quammen

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

— David Quammen

5. “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

6. “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

7. “Islands are where species go to die.”

— David Quammen

8. “How do such diseases leap from nonhuman animals into people, and why do they seem to be leaping more frequently in recent years? To put the matter in its starkest form: Human-caused ecological pressures and disruptions are bringing animal pathogens ever more into contact with human populations, while human technology and behavior are spreading those pathogens ever more widely and quickly.”

— David Quammen

9. “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

10. “As we besiege them, as we corner them, as we exterminate them and eat them, we’re getting their diseases.”

— David Quammen

11. “If you look at the world from the point of view of a hungry virus,” the historian William H. McNeill has noted, “or even a bacterium – we offer a magnificent feeding ground with all our billions of human bodies, where, in the very recent past, there were only half as many people. In some 25 or 27 years, we have doubled in number. A marvelous target for any organism that can adapt itself to invading us.”

— David Quammen

12. “Another implication was that epidemics don’t end because all the susceptible individuals are either dead or recovered. They end because susceptible individuals are no longer sufficiently dense within the population.”

— David Quammen

13. “Vast areas of old forest have been cut, or chained down with bulldozers, to make way for cattle ranching and urban sprawl. People have planted orchards, established urban parks, landscaped their yards with blossoming trees, and created other unintended enticements amid the cities and suburbs. ‘So bats have decided that, as their native habitat is disappearing, as climate is becoming more variable, and their food source is becoming less diverse, it’s easier to live in an urban area.”

— David Quammen

14. “Identity is such a crucial affair that one shouldn’t rush into it.”

— David Quammen

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

— David Quammen

16. “Humanity is a kind of animal, inextricably connected with other animals: in origin and in descent, in sickness and in health.”

— David Quammen

17. “The song of the dodo, if it had one, is forever unknowable because no human from whom we have testimony ever took the trouble to sit in the Mauritian forest and listen.”

— David Quammen

18. “The swallow that hibernates underwater is a creature called yearning.”

— David Quammen

19. “Tree of Life, which fills with its dead and broken branches the crust of the earth, and covers the surface with its ever branching and beautiful ramifications.” There’s a nice word: ramifications. It’s especially good in this context because, while the literal definition is “a structure formed of branches,” from the Latin ramus, of course the looser definition is “implications.” Darwin’s tree certainly had implications.”

— David Quammen

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

— David Quammen

21. “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

22. “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

23. “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

24. “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.”

— David Quammen

25. “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

26. “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

27. “From the ecological point of view an outbreak can be defined as an explosive increase in the abundance of a particular species that occurs over a relatively short period of time.” Then, in the same bland tone, he noted: “From this perspective, the most serious outbreak on the planet earth is that of the species Homo sapiens.”

— David Quammen

28. “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

29. “We should appreciate that these recent outbreaks of new zoonotic diseases, as well as the recurrence and spread of old ones, are part of a larger pattern, and that humanity is responsible for generating that pattern. 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

30. “At the Chatou market in Guangzhou, for instance, he had seen storks, seagulls, herons, cranes, deer, alligators, crocodiles, wild pigs, raccoon dogs, flying squirrels, many snakes and turtles, many frogs, as well as domestic dogs and cats, all on sale as food.”

— David Quammen

31. “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

32. “The ecosystem itself is not just a landscape full of plant and animal species; it’s an intricate network of relationships, including those between predators and their prey, between flowering plants and their pollinators, between fruiting plants and the animals that disperse their seeds. Each such relationship constitutes a link between trophic levels.”

— David Quammen

33. “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

34. “Habitat doesn’t replicate itself. Places get crowded. Creatures go hungry. They struggle. The result is competition and deprivation and misery, winners and losers, unsuccessful efforts to breed and, for the less fortunate individuals, early death. Many are called, but few are chosen. The book that awakened Darwin to this reality was An Essay on the Principle of Population, by a severely logical clergyman and scholar named Thomas Malthus.”

— David Quammen

35. “The term refers to cascading disruptions that can pass between trophic levels – that is, between different categories of interrelated organisms in the hierarchy of energy transfer within an ecosystem.”

— David Quammen

36. “Identifying the new virus was only step one in solving the immediate mystery of Hendra, let alone understanding the disease in a wider context. Step two would involve tracking that virus to its hiding place. Where did it exist when it wasn’t killing horses and people? Step three would entail asking a further cluster of questions: How did the virus emerge from its secret refuge, and why here, and why now?”

— David Quammen

37. “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

38. “I think the virus is present all the time, within reservoir species,” he told me. “And sometimes there is transmission from reservoir species to other species.”

— David Quammen

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

— David Quammen

40. “Will the Next Big One be caused by a virus? Will the Next Big One come out of a rainforest or a market in southern China? Will the Next Big One kill 30 or 40 million people?”

— David Quammen

41. “With influenza and many other diseases the order is reversed, high infectivity preceding symptoms by a matter of days. A perverse pattern: the danger, then the warning. That probably helped account for the scale of worldwide misery and death during the 1918–1919 influenza: high infectivity among cases before they experienced the most obvious and debilitating stages of illness.”

— David Quammen

42. “A high jeopardy of extinction comes with territory. Islands are where species go to die.”

— David Quammen

43. “Then there was a new epidemic – of fear,” said Dr. Sam Okware, Commissioner of Health Services, when I visited him in Kampala a month later. Among Dr. Okware’s other duties, he served as chairman of the national Ebola virus task force. “That was the most difficult to contain,” he said. “There was a new epidemic – of panic.”

— David Quammen

44. “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

45. “This elaborate concatenation of life-forms and sequential strategies is highly adaptive and, so far as mosquitoes and hosts are concerned, difficult to resist. It shows evolution’s power, over great lengths of time, to produce structures, tactics, and transformations of majestic intricacy. 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

46. “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

47. “Some of these viruses,” he warned, citing coronaviruses in particular, “should be considered as serious threats to human health. These are viruses with high evolvability and proven ability to cause epidemics in animal populations.”

— David Quammen

48. “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

49. “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

50. “One further factor, possibly the most crucial, was inherent to the way SARS-CoV affects the human body: Symptoms tend to appear in a person before, rather than after, that person becomes highly infectious. The headache, the fever, and the chills – maybe even the cough – precede the major discharge of virus toward other people.”

— David Quammen