Quotes by Elizabeth Kolbert

About Elizabeth Kolbert:

Elizabeth Kolbert is an American journalist and author and professor at Williams College. She is best known for her 2006 book Field Notes from a Catastrophe, and as an observer and commentator on environmentalism for The New Yorker magazine. She received the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction for her book, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

Somewhere in our DNA must lie the key mutation (or, more probably, mutations) that set us apart—the mutations that make us the sort of creature that could wipe out its nearest relative, then dig up its bones and reassemble its genome.

Elizabeth Kolbert

Right now, in the amazing moment that to us counts as the present, we are deciding, without quite meaning to, which evolutionary pathways will remain open and which will forever be closed. No other creature has ever managed this and it will, unfortun...

Elizabeth Kolbert

Of the many species that have existed on earth--estimates run as high as fifty billion--more than ninety-nine per cent have disappeared. In the light of this, it is sometimes joked that all of life today amounts to little more than a rounding error. ...

Elizabeth Kolbert

Such is the economy of nature," Thomas Jefferson wrote, "that no instance can be produced, of her having permitted any one race of her animals to become extinct; of her having formed any link in her great work so weak as to be broken." When, as Presi...

Elizabeth Kolbert

Author Bio

  • NameElizabeth Kolbert
  • Descriptionjournalist and author
  • Born1961
  • CountryUnited States Of America
  • ProfessionJournalist; Author
  • AwardsHeinz Award; Guggenheim Fellowship; National Magazine Awards; Lannan Literary Awards