Richard Preston

“To mess around with Ebola is an easy way to die. Better to work with something safer, such as anthrax.”

“When people asked him why he didn't work with those viruses, he replied, I don't particularly feel like dying.”

“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.”

“He liked the loneliness of inner space, the sense of being forgotten by the world.”

“It showed a kind of obscenity you see only in nature, an obscenity so extreme that it dissolves imperceptibly into beauty.”

“Humans in space suits make monkeys nervous.”

“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.”

“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 best way to know what's in the soup, is to boil yourself in it.”

“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.”