The End of October Quotes

“If you paid any attention to the role of disease in human affairs, you’d know the danger we’re in. We got smug after all of the victories over infection in the twentieth century, but nature is not a stable force. It evolves, it changes, and it never becomes complacent. We don’t have the time or resources now to do anything other than fight this disease. Every nation on earth has to be involved whether you think of them as friends or enemies. If we’re going to save civilization, we have to fight together and not against each other.”
― Lawrence Wright, The End of October

“DISEASES HAVE A history of stirring up conspiracies. Jews were held responsible for the Black Plague in the fourteenth century, and they were massacred in hundreds of European cities, including two thousand Jews burned alive in Strasbourg, France, on Valentine’s Day, 1349.”
― Lawrence Wright, The End of October

“Disease was more powerful than armies. Disease was more arbitrary than terrorism. Disease was crueler than human imagination. And yet young people like these doctors were willing to stand in the way of the most fatal force that nature has to offer.”
― Lawrence Wright, The End of October

“How inadequate we are in our attempts to bring nature under our control, Henry thought. How careless of us to believe that we can manipulate diseases to kill, rather than to cure. We’re like schoolchildren playing with matches. One day we’ll burn the house down.”
― Lawrence Wright, The End of October

“A friend of mine once said that when good people do good, and evil people do evil, it is not surprising. But when good people do evil, it takes religion to do that.” “I”
― Lawrence Wright, The End of October

“Bartlett stiffened. “I know what you people want me to say, but that’s not my job, is it? I am supposed to be giving you information. Real information. What you do with it is your job. Now, if you had been doing your job and providing us with the resources we asked for, maybe we wouldn’t be sitting here sucking our thumbs while people are suffering and the economy is going to hell and the graveyards are filling up and all because people like you didn’t care enough about public health to pay attention to our needs.”
― Lawrence Wright, The End of October

“At best, Henry had only slowed an inevitable, history-shaping pandemic. Governments would fall. Economies would collapse. Wars would arise. Why did we think that our own modern era was immune to the assault of humanity’s most cunning and relentless enemy, the microbe?”
― Lawrence Wright, The End of October

“The world was on the verge of a major pandemic of terrible lethality.”
― Lawrence Wright, The End of October

“Those laboratory animals have done us no harm. They are tortured and murdered in the name of science. I know, I used to do it myself to my great shame. Is the benefit to humanity worth the sacrifice of so many animal lives? I say, No.”
― Lawrence Wright, The End of October

“What leadership? Tildy thought. The president had been almost entirely absent in the debate about how to deal with the contagion, except to blame the opposing party for ignoring public health needs before he took office.”
― Lawrence Wright, The End of October

“He believed the definite loss of freedom was worse than the possible loss of life.”
― Lawrence Wright, The End of October

“Had the Chinese been more open about the disease when it first appeared, many people might have spared.”
― Lawrence Wright, The End of October

“Reverence for Life affords me my fundamental principle of morality, namely, that good consists in maintaining, assisting and enhancing life, and that to destroy, to harm or to hinder life is evil.”
― Lawrence Wright, The End of October

“when good people do good, and evil people do evil, it is not surprising. But when good people do evil, it takes religion to do that.”
― Lawrence Wright, The End of October

“Reverence for Life,” he wrote. Ethics, Schweitzer decided, was nothing more than that. “Reverence for Life affords me my fundamental principle of morality, namely, that good consists in maintaining, assisting and enhancing life, and that to destroy, to harm or to hinder life is evil.”
― Lawrence Wright, The End of October

“Henry explained his experiment on the submarine, using the variolation procedure.”
― Lawrence Wright, The End of October

“Some people carry this philosophy too far. They look at the damage mankind does to the natural world, and they forget that humans are animals as well, and also deserving of reverence.”
― Lawrence Wright, The End of October

“Both sides had entered the war already weakened by the disease, and just as in 1918, armies propagated the contagion. Hospitals, already overfilled by flu victims, were unable to treat more than a fraction of the wounded. And yet the war raged on, pulling both countries and their neighbors back into the pre-industrial world. Little was left of modernity except for weapons.”
― Lawrence Wright, The End of October

“We’re like schoolchildren playing with matches. One day we’ll burn the house down.”
― Lawrence Wright, The End of October

“Everybody knows what’s going on, she thought, but nobody knows where it’s headed. And soon nobody will remember what the point was.”
― Lawrence Wright, The End of October

“If you paid any attention to the role of disease in human affairs, you’d know the danger we’re in. We got smug after all the victories over infection in the twentieth century. But nature is not a stable force. It evolves, it changes, and it never becomes complacent. We don’t have the time or resources now to do anything other than fight this disease. Every nation on earth has to be involved, whether you think of them as friends or enemies. If we’re going to save civilization, we have to fight together and not against each other.”
― Lawrence Wright, The End of October

“If the infected organism survived, it sometimes retained a portion of the viral material in its own genome. The legacy of ancient infections might be found in as much as 8 percent of the human genome, including the genes that controlled memory formation, the immune system, and cognitive development.”
― Lawrence Wright, The End of October

“Henry inhaled the steam from his cup. “What’s that spice?” he asked. “Cardamom, cloves, and saffron,” Majid said. “We are addicted to this concoction.”
― Lawrence Wright, The End of October

“deep”
― Lawrence Wright, The End of October

“By now night had fully occupied the sky, which was splattered with stars that seemed merely a few feet away.
"I can see why religions are born in the desert," Henry said.
"Yes, we have this problem," Majid said. "God is always on top of us.”
― Lawrence Wright, The End of October

“The crown prince laughed. “But this is the flu!” he said. “We have the flu every year! We all get the flu, even the royal family!”
― Lawrence Wright, The End of October

“Three dead doctors lay in oddly contorted positions in the small clinic. They were like so many of the MSF people Henry had met around the world—young, not long out of residency. Henry understood the courage it took to face an invisible enemy. Brave men and women who rushed into battle would flee from the onset of disease. Disease was more powerful than armies. Disease was more arbitrary than terrorism. Disease was crueler than human imagination. And yet young people like these doctors were willing to stand in the way of the most fatal force that nature has to offer.”
― Lawrence Wright, The End of October

“Majid and Henry sat on the floor, staring at each other in the dazed amazement that only survivors know, where every detail is newly crisp and each fresh moment is like a crust of ice on a pond, a thin tangible layer between life and death.”
― Lawrence Wright, The End of October

“By giving her what she most wanted, he also placed her and the Indonesian government under his direction. What had been granted could also be taken away. That was an authority he had just awarded himself.”
― Lawrence Wright, The End of October