Quotes from Douglas Preston

R.'s chemotherapy is going better than expected. Total loss of hair, though. We are praying together for the first time since the early part of our marriage, and I am more filled with love for her than ever. She seems so broken and helpless; but God's love will give her and both of us strength.

I suppose the whole thing was highly irregular from a legal point of view, but it was great fun. And nobody was having more fun than the judge. It wasn't a real trial, you see, so he didn't have to worry about all the legal niceties.

I feel like I'm rolling a ball of shit up an endless mountain." "My dear Vincent, Sisyphus would be proud.

The reason they interrogated Amanda all night was to break her. Not get the truth, not get answers, not make Perugia safer, but to break her so that she would say what they wanted her to say. Amanda Knox was interrogated for eight hours. Overnight. She was denied food and water. She was denied the use of a bathroom. In a police station. In a foreign country. In a foreign language. By a dozen different officers. Without being allowed a lawyer.

There is an old French curse: may your fondest wish come true. If this treatment is cheap and available to everyone, it will destroy the earth through overpopulation. If it is dear and available only to the very rich, it will cause riots, wars, a breakdown of the social contract. Either way, it will lead directly to human misery. What is the value of a long life, when it is lived in squalor and unhappiness?

Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the NIH, told our team bluntly that, by going into the jungle and getting leishmaniasis, "You got a really cold jolt of what it's like for the bottom billion people on earth.

many extremely well-organized people have illegible handwriting

Global warming has opened the southern door of the United States not just to leish but to many other diseases. The big ones now entering our country include Zika, West Nile virus, chikungunya, and dengue fever. Even diseases like cholera, Ebola, Lyme, babesiosis, and bubonic plague will potentially infect more people as global warming accelerates

on for the rest of my life." That evening, Virgilio joined us at dinner. I asked him about the clear-cutting that checkerboarded the jungle we had flown over. He was shocked and concerned by what he'd seen. He said we had found the site in the nick of time, before deforestation and

I can scarcely believe the cruelty of the last century. It staggers the soul.

Most people, in my experience, are a little thick. If not abundantly so.

Moby Dick is my favorite book —I've been rereading it every year since I was sixteen. 'Call me Ishmael' is the greatest first line in a novel ever written.""I, myself, am not fond of animal stories.

You use reassurance, combined with pressure and release, to gentle the horse. You go slow. No surprises. Predictability and repetition.

I am indeed sorry to say this, but I fear your microscopic problems do not interest me.

From the time of its independence in 1821 to the present, Honduras has suffered through a tumultuous history that includes close to 300 civil wars, rebellions, coups, and unplanned changes in government.

New York City without

The New World was like a vast, tinder-dry forest waiting to burn—and Columbus brought the fire.

It had been presented by his great-grandfather to his great-grandmother on their wedding day. Interesting present, he thought to himself.

It was disease, more than anything else, that allowed the Spanish to establish the world's first imperio en el que nunca se pone el sol, the "empire on which the sun never sets," so called because it occupied a swath of territory so extensive that some of it was always in daylight.

Europeans killed many native people directly without the assistance of disease. In some instances, they intentionally used disease as a biological weapon by, for example, giving Indians smallpox-infected blankets. And millions more Indians died of disease who might have survived, had European brutality not left them weakened and susceptible.

There was a burst of talk and radio chatter as they discussed what to do. Within minutes, they loaded the body into the back of one jeep, restrung the live wires, fixed the fence, and drove back to the portal in the hill, which then closed slowly and silently behind them.

News of the murder had her all in a tizzy.

Hezekiah Pendergast," Constance continued, "was the great-great-grandfather of Aloysius—and a first-rate mountebank. He began his career as a snake-oil salesman for traveling medicine shows and, over time, devised his own 'medicine': Hezekiah's Compound Elixir and Glandular Restorative.

Don't live in the past—you will know what you've lost but not what you've found?