David Quammen famous quotes

03-23-2025

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
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
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
Mathematics to me is like a language I donâ€™t speak though I admire its literature in translation.
-- David Quammen

#Literature #Language #Speak
Islands are havens and breeding grounds for the unique and anomalous. They are natural laboratories of extravagant evolutionary experimentation.
-- David Quammen

#Unique #Islands #Natural
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
By the cold Darwinian logic of natural selection, evolution codifies happenstance into strategy.
-- David Quammen

#Logic #Evolution #Cold
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
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
Islands are where species go to die.
-- David Quammen

#Islands #Species
The swallow that hibernates underwater is a creature called yearning.
-- David Quammen

#Underwater #Yearning #Creatures
Among the earliest forms of human self-awareness was the awareness of being meat.
-- David Quammen

#Self #Meat #Being Me
Identity is such a crucial affair that one shouldn't rush into it.
-- David Quammen

#Animal #Identity #Affair
[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
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

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