Richard Preston Quotes

• 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

  46 Copy quote

• If equations are trains threading the landscape of numbers, then no train stops at pi.

  Richard Preston

  Math, Numbers, Landscape

  "The Mountains of Pi" by Richard Preston, www.newyorker.com. March 02, 1992.

  48 Copy quote

• 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

  "The Hot Zone: A Terrifying True Story". Book by Richard Preston, www.dailymaverick.co.za. 1999.

  16 Copy quote

• You can’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

  Richard Preston (2012). “The Hot Zone: The Chilling True Story of an Ebola Outbreak”, p.56, Random House

  11 Copy quote

• The earth is attempting to rid itself of an infection by human parasite.

  Richard Preston

  Earth, Infection, Parasites

  14 Copy quote

• 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

  Richard Preston (2012). “The Hot Zone: The Chilling True Story of an Ebola Outbreak”, p.98, Random House

  8 Copy quote

• 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

  "The Hot Zone: The Chilling True Story of an Ebola Outbreak". Book by Richard Preston, December 31, 2012.

  9 Copy quote

• Humans in space suits make monkeys nervous.

  Richard Preston

  Space, Monkeys, Suits

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  5 Copy quote

• 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, Viruses

  7 Copy quote

• The Ludolphian number is fixed in eternity— 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 circle’s diameter into its circumference.

  Richard Preston

  Character, Order, Circles

  Richard Preston (2008). “Panic in Level 4: Cannibals, Killer Viruses, and Other Journeys to the Edge of Science”, p.35, Random House

  6 Copy quote

• 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

  7 Copy quote

• He liked the loneliness of inner space, the sense of being forgotten by the world.

  Richard Preston

  Loneliness, Space, World

  Richard Preston (2012). “The Hot Zone: The Chilling True Story of an Ebola Outbreak”, p.123, Random House

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Richard Preston (2007). “The Wild Trees: A Story of Passion and Daring”, p.231, Random House

  8 Copy quote

• The best way to know what's in the soup, is to boil yourself in it.

  Richard Preston

  Soup, Way, Best Way

  5 Copy quote

• 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

  Richard Preston (2007). “The Wild Trees: A Story of Passion and Daring”, p.12, Random House

  8 Copy quote

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