Quotes from Dance of Death

Douglas Preston ·  560 pages

Rating: (23.2K votes)


“Do what? Kill me? Then my blood would be on your hands—more than it already is—as well as that of your four dear friends. Because you, frater, are responsible for all this. You know it. You made me what I am.” “I made you nothing.” “Well said! Well said!” A dry, almost desiccated laugh came over the tiny speaker. Listening,”
― Douglas Preston, quote from Dance of Death


“When you lose, don’t lose the lesson.”
― Douglas Preston, quote from Dance of Death


“Human beings are disgustingly predictable, and this is as true of psychopaths as it is of grandmothers.”
― Douglas Preston, quote from Dance of Death


“nothing is impossible. you just need to learn how to bend the rules.”
― Douglas Preston, quote from Dance of Death


“Resistance would be futile, and futility itself was, of course, to be resisted.”
― Douglas Preston, quote from Dance of Death



“anyway, the money was great, but the corporate world just wasn't to my liking. i guess i'm not a team player--or an ass-kisser.”
― Douglas Preston, quote from Dance of Death


“You could tell a lot about a person by meeting his brother.”
― Douglas Preston, quote from Dance of Death


About the author

Douglas Preston
Born place: in Cambridge, Massachusetts, The United States
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Popular quotes

“We’d read about sirens in English this fall; Greek mythology bullshit about women so beautiful, their voices so enchanting, that men did anything for them. Turned out that mythology crap was real because every time I saw her, I lost my mind.”
― Katie McGarry, quote from Pushing the Limits


“The Fever Bird

The fever bird sand out last night.
I could not sleep, try as I might.

My brain was split, my spirit raw.
I looked into the garden, saw

The shadow of the amaltas
Shake slightly on the moonlit grass

Unseen, the bird cried out its grief,
Its lunacy, without relief:

Three notes repeated closer, higher,
Soaring, then sinking down like fire

Only to breathe the night and soar,
As crazed, as desperate, as before.

I shivered in the midnight heat
And smelt the sweat that soaked my sheet.

And now tonight I hear again
The call that skewers though my brain,

The call, the brain-sick triple note--
A cone of pain stuck inits throat.

I am so tired I could weep.
Mad bird, for God's sake let me sleep

Why do you cry like one possessed?
When will you rest? When will you rest?

Why wait each night till all but I
Lie sleeping in the house, then cry?

Why do you scream into my ear
What no one else but I can hear?”
― Vikram Seth, quote from A Suitable Boy


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― Matthew Quick, quote from The Silver Linings Playbook


“I decided to forgive you after reading The Little Flowers of Saint Francis,” María began. “You remember the wolf I talked about? Well, he was a monster who terrorized everybody until Saint Francis gave him a talking-to. He was sweet as a lamb and never ate anything but vegetables after that.” “I didn’t know wolves could digest vegetables,” said Matt, who had studied biology. “That’s not the point.”
― Nancy Farmer, quote from The House of the Scorpion


“course. For in some blind, dualistic way both she and Asa insisted, as do all religionists, in disassociating God from harm and error and misery, while granting Him nevertheless supreme control. They would seek for something else—some malign, treacherous, deceiving power which, in the face of God’s omniscience and omnipotence, still beguiles and betrays—and find it eventually in the error and perverseness of the human heart, which God has made, yet which He does not control, because He does not want to control it.”
― Theodore Dreiser, quote from An American Tragedy


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