Quotessence
Home / Authors / Richard Preston
Richard Preston

Richard Preston Quotes

Writer

Filter quotes by topic

AllScienceEbolaRedwoodsTreesHumansIfsTreeVirusesWayWorld

Famous Richard Preston Quotes

“He open his mouth and gasps into the bag, and the vomiting goes on endlessly. It will not stop, and he keeps bringing up liquid, long after his stomach should have been empty. The airsickness bag fills up to the brim with a substance known as the vomito negro, or the black vomit. The black vomit is not really black; it is a speckled liquid of two colors, black and red, a stew of tarry granules mixed with fresh red arterial blood. It is hemorrhage, and it smells like a slaughterhouse. The black vomit is loaded with virus.”

EwwGenuinely Disgusted
Book:The Hot Zone: the Terrifying True Story of the Origins of the Ebola Virus
Create image

“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)”

IfsKindDifferentMovingQualityTreeEventsFlowObviousCirclesEndlessForestsDifferent KindsLinkedPrecision
Book:The Wild Trees: A Story of Passion and Daring
Create image

“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)”

PeopleWorldPracticeCuttingTreeCenturyProtectDiseaseMethodAncientStrangerRageBarsFallenVillageOutsidersReverseEldersPlagueVirusesQuarantineRoadblockSmallpoxFallen Trees
Author:Richard Preston
Create image

“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.”

WorldEndsCharacterOrderNumbersWrittenEternitySentencesCirclesEndlessFixedDivisionEnd Of The World
Book:Panic in Level 4: Cannibals, Killer Viruses, and Other Journeys to the Edge of Science
Create image