“ Baseball. The intestines may fill up completely with blood. The lining of the gut dies and sloughs off into the bowels and is defecated along with large amounts of blood. In men, the testicles bloat u… 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… Richard Preston
“ The connective tissue in his face is dissolving, and his face appears to hang from the skull. He open his mouth and gasps into the bag, and the vomiting goes on endlessly. It will not stop, and he kee… Richard Preston
“ 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. Richard Preston
“ Jahrling sat down at his desk and sighed. There was a landfill of papers on his desk, mostly about smallpox, and it was discouraging. On top of the heap sat a large red book with silver Richard Preston
“ It could be said that without sticky tape there would be no such thing as biocontainment Richard Preston
“ In 1986—the year before Peter Cardinal died—Gene Johnson had done an experiment that showed that Marburg and Ebola can indeed travel through the air. He infected monkeys with Marburg and Ebola by lett… Richard Preston
“ He becomes dizzy and utterly weak, and his spine goes limp and nerveless and he loses all sense of balance. The room is turning around and around. He is going into shock. He leans over, head on his kn… Richard Preston
“ Reaches a cell wall, it disintegrates into hundreds of individual virus particles, and the broodlings push through the cell wall like hair and float away in the bloodstream of the host. The hatched Eb… Richard Preston
“ Viruses are an essential part of nature. If all the viruses on the planet were to disappear, a global catastrophe would ensue, and the natural ecosystems of the earth would collapse in a spectacular c… Richard Preston
“ The emergence of AIDS, Ebola, and any number of other rain-forest agents appears to be a natural consequence of the ruin of the tropical biosphere. Richard Preston
“ The Ebola war wasn't won with modern medicine. It was a medieval war, and it went down as a brutal engagement between ordinary people and a life form that was trying to use the human body as a means o… Richard Preston
“ 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 sta… Richard Preston
“ One general theory for the origin of AIDS goes that, during the late nineteen-sixties, a new and lucrative business grew up in Africa, the export of primates to industrialized countries for use in med… Richard Preston
“ 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, Richard Preston
“ 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 fill… Richard Preston
“ Ebola is distantly related to measles, mumps, and rabies. It is also related to certain pneumonia viruses: to the parainfluenza virus, which causes colds in children, and to the respiratory syncytial… Richard Preston
“ Bleeds into itself; the heart muscle softens and has hemorrhages into its chambers, and blood squeezes out of the heart muscle as the heart beats, and it floods the chest cavity. The brain becomes clo… Richard Preston
“ The team had discovered the red chamber of the virus at the end of the earth, where the life form had amplified through mothers and their unborn children. Richard Preston
“ The rain forest has its own defenses. The earth’s immune system, so to speak, has recognized the presence of the human species and is starting to kick in. The earth is attempting to rid itself of an i… Richard Preston
