Richard Preston Quotes

#1. If ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, then children are somewhat closer to our roots as primates in the arboreal forest. Humans appear to be the only primates that I know of that are afraid of heights. All other primates, when they're scared, they run up a tree, where they feel safe.

Richard Preston

#2. Isn't it true that if you stare into the eyes of a cobra, the fear has another side to it? The fear is lessened as you begin to see the essence of the beauty.

Richard Preston

#3. 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

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

Richard Preston

#5. An amount of bot tox the size of the dot over this i would be enough to easily kill ten people. Bot tox is a nerve agent. It is one hundred thousand times more toxic than Sarin, the nerve gas that the Aum Shinrikyo sect released in the Tokyo subway.

Richard Preston

#6. The crown of a supertall redwood has a towering, cloudy, irregular form, and the crowns of the tallest redwoods can sometimes look like the plume of exhaust from a rocket taking off.

Richard Preston

#7. I think we sometimes give ourselves a little too much credit as humans, as being able to control and understand nature, when in fact we do neither.

Richard Preston

#8. I happen to love science ... Scientists are all slightly mad. There is truth in the stereotype of the mad scientist. They are mad with curiosity.

Richard Preston

#9. AIDS is the revenge of the rain forest.

Richard Preston

#10. Suddenly he goes into the last phase - the human virus bomb explodes. Military biohazard specialists have ways of describing this occurrence. They say that the victim has "crashed and bled out." Or more politely they say that the victim has "gone down.

Richard Preston

#11. Though the redwoods in Muir Woods are hauntingly beautiful trees, they are relatively small and not very tall, at least for redwoods.

Richard Preston

#12. But no one could control Mark Littleberry; the man was fundamentally uncontrollable.

Richard Preston

#13. Farms on the lower slopes of the mountain. As the eye moved from

Richard Preston

#14. Life on the planet is being homogenized by the expanding human population and the frequent and rapid movement of people and goods, which carry invasive organisms with them. These invasives often flourish in their new ecosystems because, like the woolly adelgid, they have escaped their predators.

Richard Preston

#15. It showed a kind of obscenity you see only in nature, an obscenity so extreme that it dissolves imperceptibly into beauty.

Richard Preston

#16. Mysteriously, almost unaccountably, my family had ended up in the trees, sort of like the Swiss Family Robinson.

Richard Preston

#17. It turns out, from what I hear, that roasted fruit bats are delicious.

Richard Preston

#18. C.J. had spoken longingly of finding the African termite queen, the glistening white sac that was half a foot long and as thick as a bratwurst, bursting with eggs and creamy insect fat, the queen you ate alive and whole, and she was said to twitch as she went down your throat. (188)

Richard Preston

#19. Fox bought the rights to the book way back when, and there was this attempt by Fox to make a movie out of 'The Hot Zone,' and it tended tragically in a Hollywood disaster involving Robert Redford and Jodie Foster and Ridley Scott. But the rights have been sitting at Fox ever since.

Richard Preston

#20. Jahrling sat down at his desk and sighed. There was a landfill of papers on his desk, mostly about smallpox, and it was discouraging. On top of the heap sat a large red book with silver

Richard Preston

#21. If a healthy person were placed on the other side of a room from a person who was sick with AIDS, the AIDS virus would not be able to drift across the room through the air and infect the healthy person.

Richard Preston

#22. Redwoods flourish in fog, but they don't like salt air. They tend to appear in valleys that are just out of sight of the sea. In their relationship with the sea, redwoods are like cats that long to be stroked but are shy to the touch.

Richard Preston

#23. The annual flight of the dragonflies goes mostly unnoticed, though it is one of the great migrations of flying creatures that occur across North America.

Richard Preston

#24. Redwood rainforest has five to 10 times the biomass - that's the sheer weight of living material - of, say, deep tropical rainforest in the Amazon basin.

Richard Preston

#25. A policy of moving out and doing it, and asking forgiveness afterward, is much better than a policy of asking permission and having it denied.

Richard Preston

#26. Redwoods have an enormous surface area that extends upward into space because they have a propensity to do something called reiteration. A redwood is a fractal. And as they put out limbs, the limbs burst into small trees, copies of the redwood.

Richard Preston

#27. Nature had seemed to be closing in on us for a kill, when she suddenly turned her face away and smiled. It was a Mona Lisa smile, the meaning of which no one could figure out.

Richard Preston

#28. An Ebola particle is only around eighty nanometres wide and a thousand nanometres long. If it were the size of a piece of spaghetti, then a human hair would be about twelve feet in diameter and would resemble the trunk of a giant redwood tree.

Richard Preston

#29. We're creating these massive urban areas in the Third World. It's like you take the entire population of California and put it in one city. Then you remove basic sanitation and medical services, and you have a ticking biological time bomb.

Richard Preston

#30. The seeds of a redwood are released from cones that are about the size of olives. The heartwood of the tree is a dark, shimmery red in color, like old claret. The wood has a lemony scent and is extremely resistant to rot.

Richard Preston

#31. The hand is a symbol of humanity, part of what makes us human - the hand that carved the Parthenon, painted the hands of God and Adam on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, and wrote King Lear was the only hand that had known smallpox. That same hand had now given the disease to a monkey.

Richard Preston

#32. There may be a little bit of finger-pointing - there always is in a situation like this - but I think of Ebola as an act of nature. It's the biological equivalent of a tsunami, and yes, we are having trouble handling it.

Richard Preston

#33. Here are the names of some emerging viruses: Lassa. Rift Valley. Oropouche. Rocio. Q. Guanarito. VEE. Monkeypox. Dengue. Chikungunya. The hantaviruses. Machupo. Junin. The rabieslike strains Mokola and Duvenhage. LeDantec. The Kyasanur Forest brain virus.

Richard Preston

#34. There may be ten million different species on the earth, or a hundred million species. The forest canopy is the earth's secret ocean, and it is inhabited by many living things that don't have names, and are vanishing before they have even been seen by human eyes.

Richard Preston

#35. 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

#36. Initially, there were a lot of fears that Ebola could mutate to become the airborne Andromeda strain that would wipe us all out.

Richard Preston

#37. What the experts are telling me is that there's very little chance that Ebola is going to mutate into something that could spread directly through the air. The real concern is not whether Ebola could go airborne, but whether it could spread faster.

Richard Preston

#38. The K-T impact had no evident long-lasting effect on the redwoods. It's possible that, after the impact, the redwoods sprouted up from the remains of their root systems, rising up in fairy rings in a ruined world ...

Richard Preston

#39. If you want to survive Ebola, you need to be young. If you're in your late 30s, the death rate is about 80 percent, and if you're over 45, then the death rate goes up to about 90 percent.

Richard Preston

#40. Dragonflies kill their prey in the air and eat it on the wing. They feed on aerial plankton, which consists of any sort of small living thing that happens to be aloft - mosquitoes, midges, moths, flies, ballooning spiders.

Richard Preston

#41. A hush came over the world, and it grew dark. There was no sunlight at the bottom of the redwood forest, only a dim, gray-green glow, like the light at the bottom of the sea. The air grew sweet, and carried a tang of lemons. They became aware of a vast forest canopy spreading over their heads.

Richard Preston

#42. ... tree has had a stroke, and its top dies. A redwood can deal with a stroke. It simply grows a new top in a few centuries.

Richard Preston

#43. 'First Light' has gotten a reputation as a kind of cult classic about science. I never really intended it to be read as a science book, but books, like children, have a way of choosing their own friends.

Richard Preston

#44. If a vaccine works, then the vaccinators might conceivably set up what's known as ring vaccinations around Ebola hot spots. In this technique, medical workers simply vaccinate everybody in a ring, miles deep, around a focus of a virus.

Richard Preston

#45. Humans in space suits make monkeys nervous.

Richard Preston

#46. These trees can teach us how we can live. We can be hammered and burned, and we an come back and be more beautiful as we grow.

Richard Preston

#47. It was as if his life's work had slipped away unfinished before he had even been born. All he could find, at best, were a few remnants of a lost world.

Richard Preston

#48. He calls it speleogenesis by elephants - the creation of a cave by elephants.

Richard Preston

#49. Seeing outward is equivalent to looking backward in time because the telescope's mirror is capturing primeval light ... galaxies that existed before our time.

Richard Preston

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

Richard Preston

#51. Botanists have a tradition of never revealing the exact location of a rare plant. Contact between humans and rare plants is generally risky for the plants.

Richard Preston

#52. No one knows exactly when or where the redwood entered the history of life on earth, though it is an ancient kind of tree and has come down to our world as an inheritance out of deep time.

Richard Preston

#53. Experiments suggest that if one particle of Ebola enters a person's bloodstream, it can cause a fatal infection. This may explain why many of the medical workers who came down with Ebola couldn't remember making any mistakes that might have exposed them.

Richard Preston

#54. 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

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

Richard Preston

#56. To mess around with Ebola is an easy way to die. Better to work with something safer, such as anthrax.

Richard Preston

#57. Whatever happens to the great systems of nature will also be what happens to us.

Richard Preston

#58. The redwoods you can see in Muir Woods are nothing like the redwood titans that stand in the rainforest valleys of the North Coast, closer to Oregon. These are the dreadnoughts of trees, the blue whales of the plant kingdom.

Richard Preston

#59. The problem with Ebola is that it makes mistakes while it copies itself. The mistakes are actually good for Ebola because they help Ebola change, and as a result of this, as it jumps from one human body to the next, roughly half the time, it's got a mutation.

Richard Preston

#60. A football player is often bigger than a basketball player - more massive, that is. The basketball player is taller and more slender. So it is with redwoods. The tallest redwoods are often slender, and so they aren't the largest ones.

Richard Preston

#61. I don't believe in a biological apocalypse, but I think there is stormy biological weather ahead as the human population continues to grow.

Richard Preston

#62. Green darners never attack people, but they have been seen bringing down hummingbirds. They are the Bengal tigers of the microworld.

Richard Preston

#63. A good businessman is hard to bruise and quick to heal.

Richard Preston

#64. The genome could be thought of as a kind of piano with twenty-five thousand keys. In some cases, a few keys may be out of tune, which can cause the music to sound wrong. In others, if one key goes dead the music turns into a cacophony, or the whole piano self-destructs.

Richard Preston

#65. The coast redwood is a so-called relict species. It is a tiny remnant of a life form that once spread in splendor and power across the face of nature. The redwood has settled down in California to live near the sea, the way many retired people do.

Richard Preston

#66. The emergence of AIDS, Ebola, and any number of other rain-forest agents appears to be a natural consequence of the ruin of the tropical biosphere.

Richard Preston

#67. The rain forest has its own defenses. The earth's immune system, so to speak, has recognized the presence of the human species and is starting to kick in. The earth is attempting to rid itself of an infection by the human parasite. Perhaps AIDS is the first step in a natural process of clearance.

Richard Preston

#68. Here's what's terrifying about Ebola. Ebola is invisible. It's a monster without a face. With the science that we have now, we can perceive Ebola as being not one thing but as a swarm, and the swarm is moving through the human population and expanding its numbers. It has the qualities of a monster.

Richard Preston

#69. Chance favors the prepared mind.

Richard Preston

#70. 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

#71. Redwood time moves at a more stately pace than human time. To us, when we look at a redwood tree, it seems to be motionless and still, and yet redwoods are constantly in motion, moving upward into space, articulating themselves and filling redwood space over redwood time, over thousands of years.

Richard Preston

#72. I'm all in favor of looking deeply into as much as we possibly can. I'm not afraid of knowledge ... With all new technology, weapons inevitably emerge ... Evil comes out of the human heart. It doesn't come out of nature.

Richard Preston

#73. When people asked him why he didn't work with those viruses, he replied, I don't particularly feel like dying.

Richard Preston

#74. Global climate change has become entangled with the problem of invasive species. A warmer climate could allow some invaders to spread farther, while causing native organisms to go extinct in their traditional habitats and making room for invaders.

Richard Preston

#75. 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

#76. Christian Bale has a kind of genetically engineered handsomeness that's perfect for [John Preston]. He's also a better actor than he ever gets credit for being.

Richard Roeper

#77. Lake of the Woods is asleep for the winter, but it is dreaming. Marie feels that she can hear the dreams of the lake running through the ice, like thoughts in a language we don't know.

Richard Preston

#78. They went through Crescent City, a tired-looking town, where you could get a beer for a dollar and maybe get a fractured skull for nothing.

Richard Preston

#79. 'First Light' is nonfiction, a true story about astronomers who are looking for light coming from the edge of the universe. It tells how science is really done - and science is a lot weirder and more human than most people realize.

Richard Preston

#80. And sometimes he thought of a favorite saying, a remark by Louis Pasteur, Chance favors the prepared mind.

Richard Preston

#81. 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

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

Richard Preston