What can the redwoods tell us about ourselves? Well, I think they can tell us something about human time. The flickering, transitory quality of human time and the brevity of human life - the necessity to love.
— Richard Preston
The most colorful Richard Preston quotes that are glad to read
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.
During climbs into taller trees, I was occasionally able to look down on the backs of birds, which shine with reflected sunlight as they move through the green depths of the canopy, like schools of fish.
It showed a kind of obscenity you see only in nature, an obscenity so extreme that it dissolves imperceptibly into beauty.
To mess around with Ebola is an easy way to die.
Better to work with something safer, such as anthrax.
Once the cells in a biological machine stop working, it can never be started again. It goes into a cascade of decay, falling toward disorder and randomness. Except in the case of viruses. They can turn off and go dead. Then, if they come in contact with a living system, they switch on and multiply. (194)
When people asked him why he didn't work with those viruses, he replied, I don't particularly feel like dying.
The Ludolphian number is fixed in eternity— not a digit out of place, all characters in their proper order, an endless sentence written to the end of the world by the division of the circle’s diameter into its circumference.
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)
The earth is attempting to rid itself of an infection by human parasite.
The best way to know what's in the soup, is to boil yourself in it.
You can’t fight off Ebola the way you fight off a cold.
Ebola does in ten days what it takes AIDS ten years to accomplish.