Richard Preston > Quotes

“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, The Hot Zone: A Terrifying True Story

“When people asked him why he didn't work with those viruses, he replied, I don't particularly feel like dying.”
― Richard Preston, The Hot Zone: A Terrifying True Story

“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, The Wild Trees: A Story of Passion and Daring

“The best way to know what's in the soup, is to boil yourself in it.”
― Richard Preston

“Humans in space suits make monkeys nervous.”
― Richard Preston, The Hot Zone: A Terrifying True Story

“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

“It showed a kind of obscenity you see only in nature, an obscenity so extreme that it dissolves imperceptibly into beauty.”
― Richard Preston, The Hot Zone: A Terrifying True Story

“He liked the loneliness of inner space, the sense of being forgotten by the world.”
― Richard Preston, The Hot Zone: A Terrifying True Story

“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