147 Quotes by Douglas Preston

Animal behaviorists have noted again and again that predatory species often kill when they have no desire to eat. They are killing because the instinct to kill is very strong.

There are many essential police skills they don’t teach you at the Academy,” said Pendergast. “Ass covering, as it is so charmingly termed, being the most important.

We didn’t use food as a reward. As some previous ASL researchers did. Jennie’s reward was making herself understood. That is, she was rewarded like a human child would be rewarded. We wanted to replicate the way a human child acquires language. You don’t cram food into an infant every time she says something, now, do you? Of course not.

Human beings are disgustingly predictable, and this is as true of psychopaths as it is of grandmothers.

I have my books. I don’t live in the actual world.

Sometimes, a society can see its end approaching from afar and still not be able to adapt, like the Maya; at other times, the curtain drops without warning and the show is over.

This was a Third World disease attacking First World people. The world is now divided into Third and First, not Old and New. Pathogens once confined to the Third World are now making deadly inroads into the First. This is the future trajectory of disease on planet Earth.

We took canoes into the heart of darkness.

One might say that modern Honduran history began in 1873, when Jules Verne introduced Americans to the banana in his novel Around the World in 80 Days, where he praised it as being “as healthy as bread and as succulent as cream.