Quotes from Douglas Preston

Many of the Spanish by this time had fallen sick, and quite a few had died, due to the unsanitary conditions on board ship and the impossibility of escaping contagion. In a few years, fully half of Columbus's fifteen hundred soldiers would be dead of disease.

I like your custom 1911," the man said, glancing at Pendergast's weapon. "Les Baer Thunder Ranch Special? Nice-looking piece.

A table of statistics for the island of Hispaniola tells the story: Date: 1492 Native Population: ~500,000 (disputed) Date: 1508 Native Population: 60,000 Date: 1510 Native Population: 33,523 Date: 1514 Native Population: 26,334 Date: 1518 [before smallpox] Native Population: 18,000 Date: 1519 [after smallpox] Native Population: 1,000 Date: 1542 Native Population: 0

There are only a few really high-profile archaeological cultures in the world: Egypt and the Maya.

Ferenc himself departed his native Hungary, along with his mother and younger brother, for an aunt's house in Reading, Pennsylvania.

The phrase, not dissimilar in sound from the mantra, got tangled up with his meditating, preventing him from achieving either peace

That's what humans do. We label, categorize, measure, and dissect because it gives us the illusion of control.

For reasons steeped in flawed intuition, differing cultural norms, and superstition, detectives in Perugia almost immediately focused on Amanda Knox as the target of their investigation. It was this "junk profiling" that caused them to believe that because she didn't weep for the victim in public, she didn't weep in private. This lack of public display of grief caused them to falsely believe she killed her friend.

You," he began. "You bastards." Silence. "Where was the FBI these past four days? This was your fault—your fault!" His voice, starting out in a whisper, crescendoed by the end into a roar, spittle flecking his lips.

It took a good two or three minutes for the water to work its way down through the canopy and reach us on the ground—

He was aware the man had suffered a deeply emotional trauma when his young companion, Constance, had abandoned him and used the machine to launch herself back in time.

an Enigma machine, a set of gears of Charles Babbage's Difference Engine, a

The Internet is indeed a non-state form of social control — but one that is severely dysfunctional. The ugliness on the Internet is not white noise. It lasts forever. It cannot be ignored. It causes terrible things happen in the real world. The Internet is a place where our darkest evolutionary biology runs riot.

meant he must have left it in his room. Exactly as Wellstone hoped. A few more people joined the entourage; they milled around outside

But that's impossible! China's footwear revenue is nearly seventy billion dollars a year. Why, Dongguan alone has fifteen hundred factories—many of them no bigger than a restaurant.

She waited, motionless in the dim light. There was no sound but the faint susurrus of wind.

Epidemiologists generally agree that smallpox is the cruelest disease ever to afflict the human race.

Russo drew his service revolver and pointed it at Jennie. Sandy, of course, went berserk, screaming and grabbing at the gun and wrapping himself around Jennie. He called Russo the most horrid names, fascist pig and that sort of thing. It must have been just awful, thinking this moron was going to shoot Jennie. I'm sure he would have if Sandy hadn't stopped him. Sandy saved Jennie's life.

Sandy told him Jennie was part of a secret government scientific project and that if they did anything to her the FBI would put him in jail.

We compared the domesticated dog with the hyena

The three-million-dollar Omega-9 Parallel Processing Computer, which took up a series of large gray boxes along one wall, was now completely silent.

who the heck is dorothy gale?

Edgardo Giobbi, lead investigator, all but confessed his ignorance with this statement to the press: "We knew she was guilty of murder without physical evidence." This embarrassingly naïve statement apparently raised no alarms in Perugia.

Ten years after smallpox, another dreadful pandemic swept the New World: measles. This we know ravaged Honduras with exceptional cruelty. For Europeans, measles is a far milder disease than smallpox; although easily spread, it rarely kills. But when it reached the New World it proved to be almost as deadly, killing at least 25 percent of the affected population.