“He found Pendergast's cool gaze on him, and he fidgeted. He'd forgotten about those eyes. They made you feel like you had just been stripped of your secrets.”
― Douglas Preston, quote from Brimstone
“Sleep is an unfortunate biological requirement that both wastes time and leaves one vulnerable.”
― Douglas Preston, quote from Brimstone
“The twentieth century showed us the evil face of physics. This century will show us the evil face of biology.”
― Douglas Preston, quote from Brimstone
“While dead men tell no tales, their corpses often speak volumes.”
― Douglas Preston, quote from Brimstone
“New York City. Once it got into your blood, you could never get it out again.”
― Douglas Preston, quote from Brimstone
“An old poet, Robert Herrick, put it like this: “ Our life is short, and our days run As fast away as does the sun; And, as a vapour or a drop of rain Once lost, can ne’er be found again.”
― Douglas Preston, quote from Brimstone
“Criticism is a profession which allows one a certain license to be vicious outside the bounds of normal civilized behavior.”
― Douglas Preston, quote from Brimstone
“Those who can’t do, teach, and those who can’t teach, critique.”
― Douglas Preston, quote from Brimstone
“I can scarcely believe the cruelty of the last century. It staggers the soul.”
― Douglas Preston, quote from Brimstone
“Don’t live in the past—you will know what you’ve lost but not what you’ve found?”
― Douglas Preston, quote from Brimstone
“As I get older, Vincent, I have come to prefer a quiet evening at home to a bracing exchange of gunfire in the dark.”
― Douglas Preston, quote from Brimstone
“There is more in the world than is dreamt of in your philosophy, Doctor - or in the Merck Manual.”
― Douglas Preston, quote from Brimstone
“I’ve never seen a more contented smile on some people than at their own wake.”
― Douglas Preston, quote from Brimstone
Douglas Preston
Born place: in Cambridge, Massachusetts, The United States
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“Yes, yes, it ended in my corrupting them all! How it could
come to pass I do not know, but I remember it clearly. The
dream embraced thousands of years and left in me only a
sense of the whole. I only know that I was the cause of their
sin and downfall. Like a vile trichina, like a germ of the
plague infecting whole kingdoms, so I contaminated all this
earth, so happy and sinless before my coming. They learnt
to lie, grew fond of lying, and discovered the charm of
falsehood. Oh, at first perhaps it began innocently, with a
jest, coquetry, with amorous play, perhaps indeed with a
germ, but that germ of falsity made its way into their hearts
and pleased them. Then sensuality was soon begotten,
sensuality begot jealousy, jealousy - cruelty . . . Oh, I don't
know, I don't remember; but soon, very soon the first blood
was shed. They marvelled and were horrified, and began to
be split up and divided. They formed into unions, but it was
against one another. Reproaches, upbraidings followed.
They came to know shame, and shame brought them to
virtue. The conception of honour sprang up, and every union
began waving its flags. They began torturing animals, and
the animals withdrew from them into the forests and became
hostile to them. They began to struggle for separation, for
isolation, for individuality, for mine and thine. They began
to talk in different languages. They became acquainted with
sorrow and loved sorrow; they thirsted for suffering, and said
that truth could only be attained through suffering. Then
science appeared. As they became wicked they began talking
of brotherhood and humanitarianism, and understood those
ideas. As they became criminal, they invented justice and
drew up whole legal codes in order to observe it, and to
ensure their being kept, set up a guillotine. They hardly
remembered what they had lost, in fact refused to believe that
they had ever been happy and innocent. They even laughed
at the possibility o this happiness in the past, and called it a
dream. They could not even imagine it in definite form and
shape, but, strange and wonderful to relate, though they lost
all faith in their past happiness and called it a legend, they so
longed to be happy and innocent once more that they
succumbed to this desire like children, made an idol of it, set
up temples and worshipped their own idea, their own desire;
though at the same time they fully believed that it was
unattainable and could not be realised, yet they bowed down
to it and adored it with tears! Nevertheless, if it could have
happened that they had returned to the innocent and happy
condition which they had lost, and if someone had shown it
to them again and had asked them whether they wanted to go
back to it, they would certainly have refused. They answered
me:
"We may be deceitful, wicked and unjust, we know it and
weep over it, we grieve over it; we torment and punish
ourselves more perhaps than that merciful Judge Who will
judge us and whose Name we know not. But we have
science, and by the means of it we shall find the truth and we
shall arrive at it consciously. Knowledge is higher than
feeling, the consciousness of life is higher than life. Science
will give us wisdom, wisdom will reveal the laws, and the
knowledge of the laws of happiness is higher than
happiness.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, quote from The Dream of a Ridiculous Man
“This day is going to be awful. It's the sort of day you wouldn't mind losing completely, even if it meant your life would be twenty-four hours shorter.”
― Alice Hoffman, quote from Here on Earth
“Is there sound, he wondered, without reception? Do you hear the shot that gets you? How big, in fact, was the Big Bang? Do our pathetic earthly squeals fall upon deaf ears? Is silence golden or common stone.”
― Tim O'Brien, quote from In the Lake of the Woods
“There's too much information out there. And not enough smart people.”
― Lori Lansens, quote from The Girls
“Ten years ago, we would have been writing perfect stories, but people's attention spans have become more limited in these, the last days of literacy.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, quote from City of Saints and Madmen
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