147 Quotes by Douglas Preston

What? This cleric wants to give Jennie religious instruction? How peverse!” I explained that he was really a harmless old man who Jennie was quite fond of. Dr. Prentiss found the whole idea diabolical. It would ruin her experiment! Well, I thought about that for all of two seconds and decided that what was right for Jennie was not necessarily right for Dr. Prentiss and her experiments. There are times, you know, when a mother simply has to do what she thinks is right.

God give me chastity, but not right now.

I have not felt her presence, as I had always believed I should if she should predecease me. Where is she? I am afraid for her, and for myself.

Most people are about as aware of their surroundings as a sea cucumber.

I felt that I was witnessing the beginnings of a great sea change in America. I was deeply moved. Through this terrible ordeal of Vietnam, I believed, we might finally see America becoming what the founding fathers had envisioned, a nation with a moral purpose in the world and a nation that cared about all its citizens. We might see the end of the cynical Nixon-Kissinger version of realpolitik. It hasn’t turned out that way, but then we are all a little older and wiser.

To one side, a vintage Rolls-Royce Silver Wraith, polished to a gem-like brilliance, sat on a flatbed trailer, ready to be taken to its new owner. Constance looked from Pendergast to the Rolls and back again. “I really don’t need two, you know,” he said.

Behind Hagedorn’s back, Kawakita had nicknamed the administrator “Stumpy.” Only Margo and a few of Frock’s other graduate students had known the name referred not to Hagedorn’s diminutive size, but to Stumpiniceps troglodytes, a particularly mundane kind of bottom-feeder that populated the oceans of the Carboniferous period.

What was that line of Sophocles from Oedipus Rex? “How awful a knowledge of the truth can be.

D’Agosta had long ago learned, when working with Pendergast, to never get caught without two things: a gun and a flashlight.