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1 " Doctors generally consider smallpox to be the worst human disease. It is thought to have killed more people than any other infectious pathogen, including the Black Death of the Middle Ages. Epidemiologists think that smallpox killed roughly one billion people during its last hundred years of activity onearth. "
― Richard Preston , The Demon in the Freezer
2 " 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: The Terrifying True Story of the Origins of the Ebola Virus
3 " It showed a kind of obscenity you see only in nature, an obscenity so extreme that it dissolves imperceptibly into beauty. "
4 " Mysteriously, almost unaccountably, my family had ended up in the trees, sort of like the Swiss Family Robinson. "
― Richard Preston
5 " we could eradicate smallpox from nature, but we could not uproot the virus from the human heart "
6 " He liked the loneliness of inner space, the sense of being forgotten by the world. "
7 " In a sense, the Earth is mounting an immune response against the human species. It is beginning to react to the human parasite, the flooding infection of people, the dead spots of the concrete all over the planet, the cancerous rot-outs in Europe, Japan and the United States, thick with replicating primates, the colonies enlarging and spreading and threatening to shock the biosphere with mass extinctions. Perhaps the biosphere does not 'like' the idea of five billion humans. "
8 " 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. "
9 " To mess around with Ebola is an easy way to die. Better to work with something safer, such as anthrax. "
10 " When people asked him why he didn't work with those viruses, he replied, I don't particularly feel like dying. "
11 " The earth is attempting to rid itself of an infection by human parasite. "
12 " 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) "
― Richard Preston , The Wild Trees: A Story of Passion and Daring
13 " And sometimes he thought of a favorite saying, a remark by Louis Pasteur, “Chance favors the prepared mind. "
14 " Humans in space suits make monkeys nervous. "
15 " 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 randomness. Except in the case of viruses. They can turn off and go dead. Then, if they come in contact with a living system, they switch on and multiply. (194) "
16 " 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. "
17 " He open his mouth and gasps into the bag, and the vomiting goes on endlessly. It will not stop, and he keeps bringing up liquid, long after his stomach should have been empty. The airsickness bag fills up to the brim with a substance known as the vomito negro, or the black vomit. The black vomit is not really black; it is a speckled liquid of two colors, black and red, a stew of tarry granules mixed with fresh red arterial blood. It is hemorrhage, and it smells like a slaughterhouse. The black vomit is loaded with virus. "
18 " Nature had seemed to be closing in on us for a kill, when she suddenly turned her face away and smiled. It was a Mona Lisa smile, the meaning of which no one could figure out. "
19 " One room in the hospital had not been cleaned up. No one, not even the nuns, had had the courage to enter the obstetric ward. When Joel Breman and the team went in, they found basins of foul water standing among discarded, bloodstained syringes. The room had been abandoned in the middle of childbirths, where dying mothers had aborted fetuses infected with Ebola. The team had discovered the red chamber of the virus queen at the end of the earth, where the life-form had amplified through mothers and their unborn children. (95) "
20 " 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. (149) "
