1. Quotes
  2. Authors
  3. Jonathan Weiner

Jonathan Weiner Quotes

Jonathan Weiner is a writer of non-fiction books on his biology observations, in particular evolution in the Galápagos Islands, genetics, and the environment.

His latest book is "Long for This World: The Strange Science of Immortality" a look at the scientific search for the Fountain of Youth.

He won the 1995 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction and the 1994 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Science for his book The Beak of the Finch. In 1999 he won the National Book Critics Circle Award and was shortlisted for the Aventis Prize in 2000 for his book Time, Love, Memory about Seymour Benzer.

Weiner graduated from Harvard University in 1976.

Weiner is the Maxwell M. Geffen Professor of Medical and Scientific Journalism at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, where he teaches writing about science and medicine. He has taught at Princeton University, Arizona State University and Rockefeller University.

Weiner is married to the children's writer Deborah Heiligman, whose focus is also nonfiction. They live in New York City with their two sons, Aaron and Benjamin.

Deborah Heiligman's book about Emma Darwin and her relationship with Charles, Charles and Emma: The Darwins' Leap of Faith —"for Middle Readers and Young Adults"—won the inaugural YALSA Award for Excellence in Nonfiction for Young Adults from the American young-adult librarians, as the year's best nonfiction book. It was the runner-up among all young-adult books based on literary merit , as well as for the National Book Award.

✵ 26. November 1953
Jonathan Weiner: 11   quotes 0   likes

Famous Jonathan Weiner Quotes

“We are doing what the dinosaurs did before us, only faster. We bring strangers together to make strange bedfellows, and we remake the beds they lie in, all at once.”

Jonathan Weiner

Source: The Beak of the Finch: A Story of Evolution in Our Time (1994), Chapter 17, The Stranger's Power

“For all species, including our own, the true figure of life is a perching bird, a passerine, alert and nervous in every part, ready to dart off in an instant. Life is always poised for flight. From a distance it looks still, silhouetted against the bright sky or the dark ground; but up close it is flitting this way and that, as if displaying to the world at every moment its perpetual readiness to take off in any of a thousand directions.”

Jonathan Weiner

Source: The Beak of the Finch: A Story of Evolution in Our Time (1994), Chapter 7, Twenty-Five Thousand Darwins

“Evolution discloses a meaning in death, although the meaning is like some of the berries that Darwin tasted in the Galapagos, "acid & Austere." There is a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. Even Drought bears fruit. Even death is a seed.”

Jonathan Weiner

Source: The Beak of the Finch: A Story of Evolution in Our Time (1994), Chapter 5, A Special Providence

“The rapid accumulation of change is not always progress, and forward motion is not always an advance.”

Jonathan Weiner

Source: The Beak of the Finch: A Story of Evolution in Our Time (1994), Chapter 20, The Metaphysical Crossbeak (p. 289)

“All times seem special to those who live in them.”

Jonathan Weiner

Source: The Beak of the Finch: A Story of Evolution in Our Time (1994), Chapter 19, A Partner in the Process (p. 276)

“What we don’t understand on either front is that the more pressure we put on our pests, the more we cause them to evolve around the pressure. The pressure is evolutionary pressure; what we fail to understand is evolution itself.”

Jonathan Weiner

Source: The Beak of the Finch: A Story of Evolution in Our Time (1994), Chapter 18, The Resistance Movement (p. 265)

Jonathan Weiner Quotes

“Why are there so many kinds of animals? Adaptive radiations like Darwin’s finches are the essence of the answer.”

Jonathan Weiner

Source: The Beak of the Finch: A Story of Evolution in Our Time (1994), Chapter 14, New Beings (p. 207)

Animals

“Geneticists will tell you that. Evolution is always happening. What they mean is that the genes of this generation are not precisely what they were the preceding generation. Nor will they be precisely the same in the next. And evolution is that change.”

Jonathan Weiner

Source: The Beak of the Finch: A Story of Evolution in Our Time (1994), Chapter 9, Creation by Variation (p. 126)

Change

“Evolution discloses a meaning in death, although the meaning is like some of the berries that Darwin tasted in the Galapagos, “acid & Austere.””

Jonathan Weiner

There is a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. Even Drought bears fruit. Even death is a seed.

Chapter 5, A Special Providence (p. 82)
The Beak of the Finch: A Story of Evolution in Our Time (1994)

Death

“Whether or not we choose to watch, evolution is shaping us all.”

Jonathan Weiner

Source: The Beak of the Finch: A Story of Evolution in Our Time (1994), Chapter 1, Daphne Major (p. 16)

“Taken together, these new studies suggest the Darwin did not know the strength of his own theory. He vastly underestimated the power of natural selection. Its action is neither rare nor slow. It leads to evolution daily and hourly, all around us, and we can watch.”

Jonathan Weiner

Source: The Beak of the Finch: A Story of Evolution in Our Time (1994), Chapter 1, Daphne Major (p. 9)

Study , Nature

Similar authors

V.S. Naipaul photo
V.S. Naipaul 34
Trinidadian-British writer of Indo-Nepalese ancestry
Czeslaw Milosz photo
Czeslaw Milosz 106
Polish, poet, diplomat, prosaist, writer, and translator
Truman Capote photo
Truman Capote 26
American author
Vladimir Nabokov photo
Vladimir Nabokov 193
Russian-American novelist, lepidopterist, professor
Isaac Asimov photo
Isaac Asimov 303
American writer and professor of biochemistry at Boston Uni…
Frank Herbert photo
Frank Herbert 158
American writer
William Saroyan photo
William Saroyan 190
American writer
Ray Bradbury photo
Ray Bradbury 401
American writer
William Faulkner photo
William Faulkner 214
American writer
Julio Cortázar photo
Julio Cortázar 29
Argentinian writer