Richard Preston famous quotes

Last updated: Sep 5, 2024

What can the redwoods tell us about ourselves? Well, I think they can tell us something about human time. The flickering, transitory quality of human time and the brevity of human life - the necessity to love.
-- Richard Preston

#Motivation #Inspiration #Thinking
If equations are trains threading the landscape of numbers, then no train stops at pi.
-- Richard Preston

#Numbers #Landscape #Equations
Time has a different quality in a forest, a different kind of flow. Time moves in circles, and events are linked, even if it's not obvious that they are linked. Events in a forest occur with precision in the flow of tree time, like the motions of an endless dance. (p. 12)
-- Richard Preston

#Moving #Circles #Tree
The Ludolphian number is fixed in eternityâ€” not a digit out of place, all characters in their proper order, an endless sentence written to the end of the world by the division of the circleâ€™s diameter into its circumference.
-- Richard Preston

#Character #Order #Circles
The best way to know what's in the soup, is to boil yourself in it.
-- Richard Preston

#Soup #Way
Occasionally they came to villages, and at each village they encountered a roadblock of fallen trees. Having had centuries of experience with the smallpox virus, the village elders had instituted their own methods for controlling the virus, according to their received wisdom, which was to cut their villages off from the world, to protect their people from a raging plague. It was reverse quarantine, an ancient practice in Africa, where a village bars itself from strangers during a time of disease, and drives away outsiders who appear. (94)
-- Richard Preston

#Cutting #Practice #People
You canâ€™t fight off Ebola the way you fight off a cold. Ebola does in ten days what it takes AIDS ten years to accomplish.
-- Richard Preston

#Fighting #Ebola #Years
Once the cells in a biological machine stop working, it can never be started again. It goes into a cascade of decay, falling toward disorder and randomness. Except in the case of viruses. They can turn off and go dead. Then, if they come in contact with a living system, they switch on and multiply. (194)
-- Richard Preston

#Fall #Cells #Machines
The earth is attempting to rid itself of an infection by human parasite.
-- Richard Preston

#Earth #Parasites #Attempting
Humans in space suits make monkeys nervous.
-- Richard Preston

#Space #Suits #Monkeys
To mess around with Ebola is an easy way to die. Better to work with something safer, such as anthrax.
-- Richard Preston

#Ebola #Way #Easy
When people asked him why he didn't work with those viruses, he replied, I don't particularly feel like dying.
-- Richard Preston

#People #Dying #Viruses
In biology, nothing is clear, everything is too complicated, everything is a mess, and just when you think you understand something, you peel off a layer and find deeper complications beneath. Nature is anything but simple.
-- Richard Preston

#Life #Simple #Thinking
He liked the loneliness of inner space, the sense of being forgotten by the world.
-- Richard Preston

#Loneliness #Space #World
It showed a kind of obscenity you see only in nature, an obscenity so extreme that it dissolves imperceptibly into beauty.
-- Richard Preston

#Kind #Obscenity #Extremes
During climbs into taller trees, I was occasionally able to look down on the backs of birds, which shine with reflected sunlight as they move through the green depths of the canopy, like schools of fish.
-- Richard Preston

#Moving #School #Shining

You may also like:

Bram Stoker
Novelist
Carl Zimmer
Science writer
Clive Cussler
Novelist
Cuba Gooding, Jr.
Film actor
David Quammen
Writer
Douglas Preston
Author
James Patterson
Author
James Rollins
Veterinarian
Jeffery Deaver
Crime writer
Jonathan Weiner
Writer
Kevin Spacey
Actor
Laurie Garrett
Journalist
Lee Child
Writer
Lincoln Child
Author
Mary Roach
Author
Michael Connelly
Author
Michael Crichton
Author
Rebecca Skloot
Freelance writer
Steve Berry
Author
Wolfgang Petersen
Film director