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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| c684050 | You will find that the woman who is really kind to dogs is always one who has failed to inspire sympathy in men. For the attractive woman, dogs are mere dumb and restless brutes--possibly dangerous, certainly soulless. Yet will coquetry teach her to caress any dog in the presence of a man enslaved by her. | Max Beerbohm | ||
| f787aee | But the dullard's envy of brilliant men is always assuaged by the suspicion that they will come to a bad end. | Max Beerbohm | ||
| 4b4f4c0 | She did not look like an orphan," said the wife of the Oriel don, subsequently, on the way home. The criticism was a just one. ... Tall and lissom, she was sheathed from the bosom downwards in flamingo silk, and she was liberally festooned with emeralds. Her dark hair was not even strained back from her forehead and behind her ears, as an orphan's should be. Parted somewhere at the side, it fell in an avalanche of curls upon one eyebrow. Fr.. | Max Beerbohm | ||
| 31908d3 | If a man carry his sense of proportion far enough, lo! he is back at the point from which he started. He knows that eternity, as conceived by him, is but an instant in eternity, and infinity but a speck in infinity. | Max Beerbohm | ||
| 3951f34 | Kanenas pou den ekhei khasei te mataiodoxia tou den mporei na theorethei oti ekhei apotukhei teleios. | Max Beerbohm | ||
| 5efa66c | Because I was a pedant. I tried to ignore you, as pedants always do try to ignore any fact they cannot fit into their pet system. | Max Beerbohm | ||
| 1e03fe5 | Not for an instant did he flinch from the mere fact of dying to-day...To die 'untimely,' as men called it, was the timeliest of deaths for one who had carved his youth to greatness. What perfection could he, Dorset, achieve beyond what was already his? Future years could but stale, if not actually mar, that perfection. Yes, it was lucky to perish leaving much to the imagination of posterity. Dear posterity was of a sentimental, not a realis.. | Max Beerbohm | ||
| adedd5d | Here was he, going to die for her; and here was she, blaming him for a breach of manners. Decidedly, the slave had the whip-hand. | Max Beerbohm | ||
| 253d101 | You wondered even when you heard that he was wont at Oxford to make without help his toilet of every day. Well, the true dandy is always capable of such high independence. He is craftsman as well as artist. | Max Beerbohm | ||
| cd753ec | Oh," every stair creaked faintly, "I ought to have been marble!" | Max Beerbohm | ||
| 8fabee9 | You will think me lamentably crude: my experience of life has been drawn from life itself. | Max Beerbohm | ||
| fbeb42c | Yet often you talk as though you had read rather much. Your way of speech has what is called 'the literary flavour'. | Max Beerbohm | ||
| 61172fe | Explain yourself!" he commanded. "Isn't that rather much for a man to ask of a woman?" "I don't know. I have no experience of women. In the abstract, it seems to me that every man has a right to some explanation from the woman who has ruined his life." (page 90)" | Max Beerbohm | ||
| 373ace3 | A free spirit's just an idiot who doesn't want to face reality. | Susan Minot | ||
| 2893acb | May God be everywhere you are about to look and absent where you already have. | Jeffrey Ford | ||
| ec10483 | Men kick friendship around like a football, but it doesn't seem to crack. Women treat it like glass and it goes to pieces. | Reader's Digest Association | ||
| 02f788a | The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, A History of Nazi Germany, by William L. Shirer, Simon and Schuster, 1960, New York; Hitler, a Study in Tyranny, by Alan Bullock, Harper, 1953, New York; | Philip K. Dick | ||
| 65cc0af | It's every man for himself," he said, and went back to reading. After my mother had died and he'd been laid off from his machinist job over in Milton, he'd retreated into near silence and the print reality of other worlds. Connection was tough for him and only getting tougher as he aged. Maggie asked me once if the reason I wanted to become a writer was to somehow make contact with him." | Jeffrey Ford | ||
| 0e8c330 | increases of the infectivity rate may lead to large epidemics." This quiet warning has echoed loudly ever since. It's a cardinal truth, over which public health officials obsess each year during influenza season. 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. W. H. Hamer had.. | David Quammen | ||
| fa5cdc1 | The main problem facing a parasite over the long term, Burnet noted, is the issue of transmission: how to spread its offspring from one individual host to another. Various methods and traits have developed toward that simple end, ranging from massive replication, airborne dispersal, environmentally resistant life-history stages (like the small form of C. burnetii), direct transfer in blood and other bodily fluids, behavioral influence on th.. | David Quammen | ||
| 266d0ad | 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 m.. | David Quammen | ||
| 87c3b55 | 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 | ||
| a26fa22 | 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 | ||
| 52f57d4 | Numbers can be an important aspect of understanding infectious disease. Take measles. At first glance, it might seem nonmathematical. It's caused by a paramyxovirus | David Quammen | ||
| 523b266 | It comes and it goes. But epidemiologists have recognized that, with measles virus, as with other pathogens, there's a critical minimum size of the host population, below which it can't persist indefinitely as an endemic, circulating infection. This is known as the critical community size (CCS), an important parameter in disease dynamics. | David Quammen | ||
| cb3b5b2 | Hamer was especially interested in why diseases such as influenza, diphtheria, and measles seem to mount into major outbreaks in a cyclical pattern--rising to a high case count, fading away, rising again after a certain interval | David Quammen | ||
| 1a1448a | Continuation of the outbreak depended on the likelihood of encounters between people who were infectious and people who could be infected. This idea became known as the "mass action principle." It was all about math. The same year, 1906, a Scottish physician named John Brownlee proposed an alternate view, contrary to Hamer's. Brownlee worked as a clinician and hospital administrator" | David Quammen | ||
| 282fefb | 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 | ||
| 4ab43b9 | Humanity badly needs things that are big and fearsome and homicidally wild. Counterintuitive as it may seem, we need to preserve those few remaining beasts, places, and forces of nature capable of murdering us with sublime indifference. | David Quammen | ||
| 78b583f | 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 | ||
| f8c1960 | One of the most intricate Cold War spy novels I've ever read is David Quammen's The Soul of Viktor Tronko, based on the real-life case of a Cold War-era Russian defector who tells his debriefers that a Russian agent has infiltrated the upper echelons of the CIA. | Nancy Pearl | ||
| 706a55f | Als de hemel donker wordt met zwarte donderwolken, de grote bomen zwaaien in de wind, de pauwen zingen, hunker ik ernaar terug te rennen naar Gir. | indian-lion maldhari panthera-leo-persica | David Quammen | |
| b51c83c | An amplifier host is a creature in which a virus or other pathogen replicates--and from which it spews--with extraordinary abundance. Some aspect of the host's physiology, or its immune system, or its particular history of interaction with the bug, or who knows what, accounts for this especially hospitable role. | David Quammen | ||
| 7958ace | Horses aren't native to Australia. They are exotic, first brought there by European settlers barely more than two centuries ago. Hendra is probably an old virus, according to the runic evidence of its genome, as read by molecular evolutionists. | David Quammen | ||
| ad542e6 | 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 | ||
| 63a5adb | problem peaked in 1952 with an outbreak that killed more than three thousand victims, many of them children, and left twenty-one thousand at least partially paralyzed. Soon afterward, vaccines developed by Jonas Salk, Albert Sabin, and a virologist named Hilary Koprowski (about whose controversial career, more later) came into wide use, eventually eliminating poliomyelitis throughout most of the world. In 1988, WHO and several partner insti.. | David Quammen | ||
| 2c77a33 | Their most telling improvement involved a fundamental parameter: population size of the hosts. | David Quammen | ||
| 5c42e4d | 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. Even among some of the superspreaders, in 2003, this seems to have been true. That order of events allowed many SARS .. | David Quammen | ||
| 0d5f25e | 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 | ||
| 68191c7 | The first rule of a successful parasite? Myxoma's success in Australia suggests something different from that nugget of conventional wisdom I mentioned above. It's not Don't kill your host. It's Don't burn your bridges until after you've crossed them. | David Quammen | ||
| 5cfacbb | 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 | ||
| 487820a | 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 | ||
| 7e3c6e9 | 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 | ||
| 3d0f758 | The author David Quammen cautions that while it is easy to demonize the brown tree snake, the animal is not evil; it's just amoral and in the wrong place. What Boiga irregularis has done in Guam, he observes, "is precisely what Homo sapiens has done all over the planet: succeeded extravagantly at the expense of other species." -- | Elizabeth Kolbert |