Quotes from Richard Preston

A six-foot-tall man and a ten-pound monkey are pretty evenly matched in a stand-up fight. The monkey will be all over the man. By the end of the fight, the man may need hundreds of stitches, and could be blinded.

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.

They were two human primates carrying another primate. One was the master of the earth, or at least believed himself to be, and the other was a nimble dweller in trees, a cousin of the master of the earth. Both species, the human and the monkey, were in the presence of another life form, which was older and more powerful than either of them, and was a dweller in blood.

If you bleed into the second space, you bleed into your stomach and intestines. If you bleed into the third space, you bleed into the space between the skin and the flesh. The

Variola is now exotic to the human species, highly infective in humans, lethal, and difficult or impossible to cure. It is generally believed to be the most dangerous virus to the human species.

There were five hundred monkeys inside that building. That was about three tons of monkey meat—a biological nuclear reactor having a core meltdown. As the core of monkeys burned, the agent would amplify itself tremendously.

Surely some smart Army lawyers could figure out why the act of carrying Ebola-ridden dead monkeys across state lines in the trunk of a private automobile was so completely legal that there had never even been any question about it.

staff. A characteristic of a lethal, contagious, and incurable virus is that it quickly gets into the medical people.

He was an amateur naturalist, fond of birds and animals but not of humanity in general.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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)

Humans in space suits make monkeys nervous.

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