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…

- Richard Preston

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

- Richard Preston

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…

- Richard Preston

You can’t fight off Ebola the way you fight off a cold. Ebola does in ten days what it takes AIDS ten years to accomplish.

- Richard Preston

Once the cells in a biological machine stop working, it can never be started again. It goes into a cascade of decay, falling toward disorder and rand…

- Richard Preston

If equations are trains threading the landscape of numbers, then no train stops at pi.

- Richard Preston

What can the redwoods tell us about ourselves? Well, I think they can tell us something about human time. The flickering, transitory quality of human…

- 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 l…

- Richard Preston

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

- Richard Preston