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Richard Preston,
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Science Quotes by Richard Preston, (8 quotes)
He saw virus particles shaped like snakes, in negative images. They were white cobras tangled among themselves, like the hair of Medusa. They were the face of nature herself, the obscene goddess revealed naked. 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.
— Richard Preston,
The Hot Zone
If equations are trains threading the landscape of numbers, then no train stops at pi.
— Richard Preston,
In Panic in Level 4: Cannibals, Killer Viruses, and Other Journeys to the Edge (2009), 33-34.
If you ask a person, “What were you thinking?” you may get an answer that is richer and more revealing of the human condition than any stream of thoughts a novelist could invent. I try to see through people’s faces into their minds and listen through their words into their lives, and what I find there is beyond imagining.
— Richard Preston,
…...
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.
— Richard Preston,
The Hot Zone
It showed a kind of obscenity you see only in nature, an obscenity so extreme that it dissolves imperceptibly into beauty.
— Richard Preston,
The Hot Zone
The best way to know what’s in the soup, is to boil yourself in it.
— Richard Preston,
…...
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.
— Richard Preston,
The Wild Trees: A Story of Passion and Daring
To mess around with Ebola is an easy way to die. Better to work with something safer, such as anthrax.
— Richard Preston,
The Hot Zone
In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion.
(1987) -- 
