111 Quotes by David Quammen

On April 3, 2014, Jane Goodall turned 80. The iconic blond ponytail has gone gray, but the sparkle of intelligence, sly humor, and fierce dedication still shines from her hazel eyes.

I'm a white, middle-class male who had a happy childhood in Ohio. The world does not need me to be a novelist.

You can't take a knife on a plane anymore, but you can get on carrying a virus.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.