Quotes from Douglas Preston

because it's not enough to have a dream—you need financing.

I had a botfly bite once, on my forehead. Felt like a mosquito at first. It began to swell and turn red. Hurt like the devil. A month later it erupted, and inch-long botfly maggots started squirming out and dropping to the ground.

And as Coldmoon closed the door behind him, he could still hear the faint sound of Pendergast's laughter—dulcet, melodious, yet infinitely sad—as he maintained his sanity by skipping from one tiny sliver of time to another, between the beat of a hummingbird's wings.

Mitochondrial DNA is completely separate from a person's regular DNA. It's a bit of genetic material residing in the mitochondria of every cell in the body, and it is inherited unchanged from generation to generation, through the female line. That means all the descendants—male and female—of a particular woman will have identical mitochondrial DNA, which we call mtDNA. This kind of DNA is extremely useful in forensic work, and separate databases are kept of it.

If you're honest with yourself, you can still feel the terrible weight of time pressing on you; that awful, relentless, bodily corruption that is happening constantly to us all.

it was never too late for the truth.

Jennie is very like a human child in challenging and testing her elders. I feel that R. wants to love Jennie, and wants Jennie to love her. She does not, I fear, have the right touch with Jennie. She is too cross and nervous, and she is overly attached to material objects. Jennie is very sensitive and has a mischievous streak in her. The combination is not good.

Once it got into your blood, you could never get it out again.

El moribundo frente marítimo al final había sucumbido al perverso huracán Yankee Clipper de 1938.

Wine is like many of the finer things in life, which take time and experience to extract their full pleasure and meaning.

Back in their special forces days, there were times when Pendergast had disappeared just like this—no word to anyone—only to reappear later with some important objective accomplished. It had happened often enough that their team developed a slang term for it—Don't pull a Pendergast meant "Don't disappear without explanation.

Alterman had hired a professional ASL interpreter from the Somerville School for the Deaf. Her credentials were impeccable. She was terrific and we had very carefully coached Jennie and rehearsed her testimony. For days on end we rehearsed what Jennie was to say. If she were human I am sure it would have been illegal, coaching the witness the way we did.

The problem is people establish a national park and think they've won the war. No way. That's only the first step—a battle in a longer war.

The minute the judge saw Jennie in her little blue suit with the big red bow, and saw her signing back and forth with the interpreter, he would never, ever, in a thousand years, find her a menace to society and order her destroyed. How could he? She was just like a little person!

All indications are that burglar/murderer Rudy Guede was a police informant.

Time is a storm in which we are all lost

Then he got out, whistling tunelessly under his breath and pulling a sheaf of mail and a small sack of groceries from the passenger seat as he did so. A long, narrow pain d'epi stuck up from the sack like a flagpole; while he considered himself a gourmet chef, the art of bread baking was a skill that had always eluded him. Besides, there was a place in Santa Fe that made the best French bread he'd tasted this side of the Rive Gauche.

Jennie's testimony was meaningless to determine the facts of the case, but that he was allowing it anyway. The judge wanted to see the signing chimpanzee in action.

Krugle-like search engine

But on the final evening of Amanda's interrogation, she was interrogated all night. Not by just one or two detectives, but by adozen—twelve—detectives. Again, the police not only do not dispute this; they have entered this evidence into court.

The purpose of interrogating at night has more to do with torture than law enforcement.

Human beings," he said, "have a bottomless capacity for rationalization and self-deception.

In the American Southwest, for example, parts of the great Anasazi road system and its way stations were closed in the thirteenth century by burning brush and smashing sacred pots along its length, when the ancestral Pueblo people abandoned the region.

They use the label "anthropomorphization" as a cover, because they're scared that maybe we're all just animals after all!