Top 120 Douglas Preston Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “There was a pause while Pendergast considered this. “I prefer hypocrisy to poverty.” “Come to think of it, there is a rationale. Leng didn’t make his money from killing. He made it from speculating in railroads, oil, and precious metals.” Pendergast raised his eyebrows. “I did not know that.” “There is much you still don’t know about him.”

— Douglas Preston

52. “She picked up the book she was reading, Beyond the Ice Limit, found her dog-eared place at the beginning of chapter six, and began to read. The sea horizon lay against the sky, blue against perfect blue, and it seemed to beckon the ship southward, ever southward. She closed the book, put it down again. Not bad, but it lacked the punch of the original.”

— Douglas Preston

53. “If this sounds like strange talk from a scientist – so be it. If there is one thing I have learned from a lifetime study of science, it is that the world is not a place we human beings will ever comprehend. Understand, yes; comprehend, no.”

— Douglas Preston

54. “It seems that a civilization-wide catastrophe involving the “death” of all these cities occurred at approximately the same time, around 1500 – the time of the Spanish conquest. Yet the Spanish never conquered the region; they never explored or even penetrated these remote jungles.”

— Douglas Preston

55. “This was a Third World disease attacking First World people. The world is now divided into Third and First, not Old and New. Pathogens once confined to the Third World are now making deadly inroads into the First. This is the future trajectory of disease on planet Earth.”

— Douglas Preston

56. “There are so many journalists out there, I hate to say it, who are lazy and don’t do their research – and it shows.”

— Douglas Preston

57. “At what point in evolution did man acquire the knowledge of good and evil, and thus the capacity to be damned? In this light, the story of Adam and Eve takes on deeper significance. It is a parable of evolution.”

— Douglas Preston

58. “But when I open them up, I find that they’re equal! And they both have achieved the same destiny: my zinc gurney. Why, then, did he tire himself out poring over so many books? Boh! Take my advice, journalist: eat, drink, and enjoy yourself –.”

— Douglas Preston

59. “There is nothing inherently wrong about science.”

— Douglas Preston

60. “There was a pause while Pendergast considered this. “I prefer hypocrisy to poverty.”

— Douglas Preston

61. “But all was not well; a creeping rot – environmental, economic, and social – had been undermining its society for some time and would eventually lead to destruction.”

— Douglas Preston

62. “A human being creates complexity by writing a novel on the surface of paper; a weather system creates complexity by writing waves on the surface of an ocean. What is the difference between the information carried in the words of a novel and the information carried on the waves of the sea? Listen, and the waves will speak, and someday, I tell you, you will write your thoughts on the surface of the sea.”

— Douglas Preston

63. “Even with the intense excitement and high spirits, the hike back to camp was grueling, as the steep hillsides were impossible to descend except in a semi-controlled sort of falling slide.”

— Douglas Preston

64. “Global warming has opened the southern door of the United States not just to leish but to many other diseases. The big ones now entering our country include Zika, West Nile virus, chikungunya, and dengue fever. Even diseases like cholera, Ebola, Lyme, babesiosis, and bubonic plague will potentially infect more people as global warming accelerates.”

— Douglas Preston

65. “She learned her first two signs five weeks later, on – let’s see here – June 4, 1967. They were hug and me. On June 6, she spontaneously signed Hug me Jennie to Mrs. Archibald, her surrogate mother. Mrs. Archibald was under the impression that Jennie’s first sign had been directed at her. I didn’t correct that misapprehension. Why? I should suppose the reason’s obvious.”

— Douglas Preston

66. “Criticism is a profession which allows one a certain license to be vicious outside the bounds of normal civilized behavior.”

— Douglas Preston

67. “Zero-sum games deal with resources that neither increase nor decrease in amount – they only shift from one player to the other.”

— Douglas Preston

68. “How awful a knowledge of the truth can be.”

— Douglas Preston

69. “Sometimes, a society can see its end approaching from afar and still not be able to adapt, like the Maya; at other times, the curtain drops without warning and the show is over.”

— Douglas Preston

70. “When I’m writing fiction I’m thinking, God, this is so hard – I have to make all this stuff up! I wish I were writing a nonfiction book where all the facts are laid out and I don’t have to be so much at sea.”

— Douglas Preston

71. “I’m pretty much a 9-to-5 kind of guy. I usually get to work about 8 in the morning, and I work until 4 or 5, and sometimes I work on Saturday and Sunday mornings. Pretty much I keep the same hours as an accountant or clerk or whatever.”

— Douglas Preston

72. “She felt his shoulders began to convulse, faintly, regularly, almost as if he was weeping. But that was, of course, impossible, as Pendergast would never cry.”

— Douglas Preston

73. “I need to write in a small room – the smaller the better. I can’t write in a big room where someone might sneak up behind my back.”

— Douglas Preston

74. “F. Scott Fitzgerald’s quotation: The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function?”

— Douglas Preston

75. “Once again, we shall have to operate not only outside the box, but outside the room containing the box.”

— Douglas Preston

76. “Every year he would select a few projects that he felt had no merit and would award them a golden fleece. As in “fleecing” the taxpayers.”

— Douglas Preston

77. “In the most deadly variety of smallpox, the hemorrhagic form, called the bloody pox or black pox, the skin turns a deep purple or takes on a charred look, and comes off in sheets. The victim often “bleeds out,” blood pouring from every orifice in the body. It is extremely contagious. Unlike most other viruses, smallpox can survive and remain virulent for months or years outside the body in clothing, blankets, and sickrooms.”

— Douglas Preston

78. “Fire is often the weapon of choice for the insane.”

— Douglas Preston

79. “Tyrannosaur Canyon Utopia The Codex Tales of the Dark 1–3 Ribbons of Time Dark.”

— Douglas Preston

80. “We didn’t use food as a reward. As some previous ASL researchers did. Jennie’s reward was making herself understood. That is, she was rewarded like a human child would be rewarded. We wanted to replicate the way a human child acquires language. You don’t cram food into an infant every time she says something, now, do you? Of course not.”

— Douglas Preston

81. “We took canoes into the heart of darkness.”

— Douglas Preston

82. “He had done the right thing and that was what counted. That was the best you could do in life. How others took it was beyond his control.”

— Douglas Preston

83. “When the team excavated, they uncovered the shattered ruins of a fortress, over fifteen centuries old, with massive walls and eight towers, matching the description in the Koran. They also figured out what had happened: The constant removal of water from the watering hole undermined the fortress, which one day collapsed into a sinkhole and was buried by drifting sands. The legend recorded in the Koran was based on a real event.”

— Douglas Preston

84. “D’Agosta had long ago learned, when working with Pendergast, to never get caught without two things: a gun and a flashlight.”

— Douglas Preston

85. “Russo drew his service revolver and pointed it at Jennie. Sandy, of course, went berserk, screaming and grabbing at the gun and wrapping himself around Jennie. He called Russo the most horrid names, fascist pig and that sort of thing. It must have been just awful, thinking this moron was going to shoot Jennie. I’m sure he would have if Sandy hadn’t stopped him. Sandy saved Jennie’s life.”

— Douglas Preston

86. “He could now see inside the sneaker. It was filled with something, a pulpy red-pink with a shard of pure white projecting up from the middle. Ward froze, his mind not quite able to process what he was staring at.”

— Douglas Preston

87. “It is all about how human beings construct a narrative out of random events, baseless assumptions, and simple-minded prejudices.”

— Douglas Preston

88. “Nobody knows what language is. It isn’t just speech, that’s for sure. But try to explain that to some of these reductionist structural linguists.”

— Douglas Preston

89. “Instead she violently signed Bite, angry, angry, bite! with both hands right in my face. It was an astonishing and very intimidating performance.”

— Douglas Preston

90. “Anyway, these conclusions came from people who had never spent any time with chimpanzees. You can’t tell anything from a two-hour videotape. I spent five years with five chimpanzees. There are so many modes of communication between human and chimp that can’t be quantified. Body language. Vehemence and speed of gesture, facial expression. You had to be there with Jennie to understand the depth of communication. With our enemies out there, and a Senator against us, we got hammered.”

— Douglas Preston

91. “The tree crowns were packed together like puffballs, displaying every possible hue, tint, and shade of green. Chartreuse, emerald, lime, aquamarine, teal, bottle, glaucous, asparagus, olive, celadon, jade, malachite – mere words are inadequate to express the chromatic infinities.”

— Douglas Preston

92. “The Monster’s crimes were so horrific that a mere man could not possibly have committed them. Satan, in the end, had to be invoked.”

— Douglas Preston

93. “I have my books. I don’t live in the actual world.”

— Douglas Preston

94. “I have not felt her presence, as I had always believed I should if she should predecease me. Where is she? I am afraid for her, and for myself.”

— Douglas Preston

95. “You mean, let our most excellent Congress deal with this situation in the same way it has handled our other pressing national problems, such as global warming, terrorism, education, and our crumbling infrastructure?”

— Douglas Preston

96. “Jennie never did reject me, however. Oh no. She loved me to the very end. Her love for me was more powerful than anything the Archibalds could undermine.”

— Douglas Preston

97. “To most people, Metcalf had discovered, silence was even more unbearable than pointed questioning.”

— Douglas Preston

98. “The town had a faint air of benign neglect that only added to its charm: a seaside village with white clapboard buildings, seagulls wheeling overhead, uneven brick sidewalks and local shops. They passed a gas station, several old storefronts with plate-glass windows, a diner, a funeral parlor, a movie theater turned into a bookstore, and an eighteenth-century sea captain’s mansion, complete with widow’s walk. A sign out front identified it as the Exmouth Historical Society and Museum.”

— Douglas Preston

99. “Animal behaviorists have noted again and again that predatory species often kill when they have no desire to eat. They are killing because the instinct to kill is very strong.”

— Douglas Preston

100. “This was an intentional frame.”

— Douglas Preston