117 Quotes by Richard Preston

There may be ten million different species on the earth, or a hundred million species. The forest canopy is the earth’s secret ocean, and it is inhabited by many living things that don’t have names, and are vanishing before they have even been seen by human eyes.

This life form thing was breathtakingly beautiful. As he stared at it, he found himself being pulled out of the human world into a world where moral boundaries blur and finally dissolve completely. He was lost in wonder and admiration, even though he knew that he was the prey.

Mysteriously, almost unaccountably, my family had ended up in the trees, sort of like the Swiss Family Robinson.

The team had discovered the red chamber of the virus at the end of the earth, where the life form had amplified through mothers and their unborn children.

A temperate rain forest has a cool, moist, even climate, not too hot or cold. Redwoods flourish in fog, but they don’t like salt air. They tend to appear in valleys that are just out of sight of the sea. In their relationship with the sea, redwoods are like cats that long to be stroked but are shy to the touch.

Nobody knows the ages of any of the living giant coast redwoods, because nobody has ever drilled into one of them in order to count its annual growth rings. Drilling into an old redwood would not reveal its age, anyway, because the oldest redwoods seem to be hollow; they don’t have growth rings left in their centers to be counted. Botanists suspect that the oldest living redwoods may be somewhere between two thousand and three thousand years old-they seem to be roughly the age of the Parthenon.

The paving of the Kinshasa Highway affected every person on earth, and turned out to be one of the most important events of the twentieth century. It has already cost at least ten million lives, with the likelihood that the ultimate number of human casualties will vastly exceed the deaths in the Second World War.

Ebola virus moves from one person to the next by following the deepest and most personal ties of love, care, and duty that join people to one another and most clearly define us as human. The virus exploits the best parts of human nature as a means of travel from one person to the next. In this sense the virus is a true monster.

Lake of the Woods is asleep for the winter, but it is dreaming. Marie feels that she can hear the dreams of the lake running through the ice, like thoughts in a language we don’t know.