Richard Preston Quotes

10 Sourced Quotes

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.

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

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

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

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

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

Richard Preston
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.

Richard Preston
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