Quotes from Douglas Preston

Nobody ever makes their plans as if they're going to die the next day.

And what was he like? Did he have three heads?" "If he did, two must have been successfully removed in infancy.

America. What a wonderful country. Too bad it was doomed to fail.

I remember shaking her hand while her eyes wandered about the room, looking over my head, at my feet—like a rude guest at a party.

This wine is austere, structured, with great finesse, and a long, lingering finish.

He was lying on his back, eating peanuts, and gazing straight up with binoculars at the troop of spider monkeys. They in turn were lined up on a limb fifty feet above, staring down at him and eating leaves. It was a funny sight, two curious primate species observing each other with fascination.

We live in a nation of ignoramuses. The average American knows nothing about science. A man asked me once if the stars went away when the sun rose, or if they were still there but you just couldn't see them. He was a stockbroker I had the misfortune of employing, a man who made over one hundred thousand dollars a year! Well, I took my investments away from him, damn quick! And then the market climbed five hundred points.

For one thing, I lack proprioception." "What's that?" "The feeling of having a body. I don't have any sense of occupying space. I feel incomplete. Unfastened. Floating. Like I'm not quite there.

No Trespassing Violators Will Be Prosecuted With the Utmost Rigor of the Law

I do not begrudge the average American his ignorance. It's a free country. But when you have elected officials, people who wield enormous power, who flaunt their ignorance, that is a different matter.

In five days, lidar had accomplished seven times more than the Chases had achieved in twenty-five years.

There can be no doubt: life is a miraculous thing, and even more miraculous is human intelligence. Our world, this earth, is a surpassingly beautiful place, perfectly suited to our needs. It is as if the world were created for us, so perfect is it. But this is an illusion; in fact, we were created for the world. The world is just right for us because we've been adapting to it for millions of years.

Alas, his efforts to create predictive AI ended in failure. The world is ruled by chaos, and human behavior is too complex.

The act of living causes brain damage.

So, after half a million, what did the chimps say?" Well, not much, when you really analyze it. That wasn't the point, for God's sake! And the scientists who supported us were afraid to object. They didn't want to attract Proxmire's attention. Cowards, every one.

Understanding how things fail is the most important component in solving engineering problems.

In other words, the case, almost from the beginning, was more about covering up mistakes and protecting the careers of powerful people than in finding the truth about who killed Meredith Kercher.

issued a muffled cry and slashed with the knife, but it rent only

It is a capital mistake to develop a premature hypothesis in the absence of hard data.

It's overstated, true, but what it really means is that the tiniest change in the initial conditions of a system can snowball into gigantic effects later on. Wallace

Evolution extracts a price. What is the price? Sickness, old age, and death; tragedy, hunger, sorrow, pain, and suffering—all these must exist in order for evolution to operate. Without death there can be no evolution.

They got the loot through customs in their carry-on bags by mixing the artifacts in with a lot of "tourist junk" bought at a gift shop, putting fake prices on everything, and wrapping them in newspaper

If you have the golden chicken, the archaeologists don't want the chicken to produce any golden eggs, but the tourist guys, they want to cut it open to get all the eggs at once. There should be a balance.

All living things must pay dearly for the miracle of their existence. We human beings must pay the highest price of all, because evolution has given us a brain capable of understanding death. And death lies across all our lives like some hideous, vulgar joke.