David Quammen
David Quammen
David Quammenis an American science, nature and travel writer and the author of fifteen books, five of them fiction. He wrote a column, called "Natural Acts" for Outside magazine for fifteen years. His articles have also appeared in National Geographic, Harper's, Rolling Stone, the New York Times Book Review and other periodicals. In 2013, Quammen's book Spillover was shortlisted for the PEN/E. O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionScientist
CountryUnited States of America
David Quammen quotes about
mean reality views
[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.
people lions sacred
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.
world novel using-me
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.
miracle life-is-hard cheerful
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.
spiritual school intelligent
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.
loss rivers water
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.
hate writing character
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.
animal identity wildlife
Identity is such a crucial affair that one shouldn't rush into it.
self meat being-me
Among the earliest forms of human self-awareness was the awareness of being meat.
logic cold evolution
By the cold Darwinian logic of natural selection, evolution codifies happenstance into strategy.
lying reading world
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.
hints answers shapes
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."
plutonium evolution culmination
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.
book comforting intellectual
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.