David Quammen Quotes

The problem with people who say monsters don't really exist is that they're almost never saying it to the monsters." —Alice Healy

Monsters come in all shapes and sizes, Some of them are things people are scared of. Some of them are things that look like things people used to be scared of a long time ago. Sometimes monsters are things people should be scared of, but they aren't.

Later, a large band of Christians mounted an attack on this native lord, butchering him along with vast numbers of his people and taking all the survivors into slavery, where they duly perished, so that today not a trace remains of what was previously a community with dominion over an area of some thirty leagues.

I don't think we have enough imaginary creatures in cinema. It seems like we're stuck with zombies, vampires, and werewolves. We should have everything. We should have minotaurs. We should have elves. We should have mermen in popular culture. But instead we've stuck with vampires.

Here there be monster." Bob whispered, half hysterically. "Run! Run already!

We need metaphors of magic and monsters in order to understand the human condition.

He had read books, newspapers and magazines. He knew that if you ran away you sometimes met bad people who did bad things to you; but he had also read fairy tales, so he knew that there were kind people out there, side by side with the monsters.

In the land of God's and Monsters, I was an angel looking to get f-ked hard.

People who are considered scary or odd or even monsters are so often the people that just need love and someone to care for them.

I may not be sure if monsters exist, but I’d rather live my life in doubt than be persuaded by a real experience of one.

Oh, Creator! Can monsters exist in the sight of him who alone knows how they were invented, how they invented themselves, and how they might not have invented themselves?

I think we may class the lawyer in the natural history of monsters.

I don't like people that make their living talking about bullshit, and you see them in many shows that are made on the same subject. When you go looking at UFOs or bigfoot or what-have-you, there's just nothing there.

It is a very grave matter to be forced to imitate a people for whom you know-which is the price of your performance and survival-you do not exist. It is hard to imitate a people whose existence appears, mainly, to be made tolerable by their bottomless gratitude that they are not, thank heaven, you.

One of the ways of helping to destroy a people is to tell them they don't have a history that they have no roots.

Once upon a time, a little girl was raised by monsters. But angels burned the doorways to their world, and she was all alone.

We do not know how we'd behave. But a lot of people facing fascism didn't become fascists. I don't happen to believe that we are all monsters.

What the creeping crud is that?" [Percy] demanded. "You’re inside a giant glowing chicken-man!" "Hawk!" I yelled. I decided that if I survived this day I would have to make sure this guy never met Sadie. They’d probably take turns insulting me for the rest of eternity.

This is ideological colonization. They colonize people with ideas that try to change mentalities or structures, but this is not new. This was done by the dictatorships of the last century.

People who commit monstrous crimes are not necessarily monsters. If they were, things would be easy. But they aren't and it is one of the experiences of life.

People who deny the existence of dragons are often eaten by dragons. From within.

Every colonized people-in other words, every people in whose soul an inferiority complex has been created by the death and burial of its local cultural originality-finds itself face to face with the language of the civilizing nation; that is, with the culture of the mother country. The colonized is elevated above his jungle status in proportion to his adoption of the mother country's cultural standards.

Midian is where the monsters go.

Gnomes live ten times faster than humans. They're harder to see than a high-speed mouse. That's one reason why most humans hardly ever see them. The other is that humans are very good at not seeing things they know aren't there. And, since sensible humans know that there are no such things as people four inches high, a gnome who doesn't want to be seen probably won't be seen... Wings.

I've always been curious about the monster that lives under your bed. Even at 30 years old you lean over the bed to see if there's something under there, potentially.