Douglas Preston · 629 pages
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“The wise and good are outnumbered a thousand to one by the brutal and stupid.”
― Douglas Preston, quote from The Cabinet of Curiosities
“One can reach the gates of hell just as easily by short steps as by large.”
― Douglas Preston, quote from The Cabinet of Curiosities
“I’m afraid I don’t suffer petty bureaucrats gladly. A very bad habit, but one I find hard to break. Nevertheless, you will find, Dr. Kelly, that humiliation and blackmail, when used judiciously, can be marvelously effective”
― Douglas Preston, quote from The Cabinet of Curiosities
“PEE-WEE BOXER SURVEYED THE JOBSITE WITH DISGUST. THE FOREMAN was a scumbag. The crew were a bunch of losers. Worst of all, the guy handling the Cat didn't know jack about hydraulic excavators. Maybe it was a union thing; maybe he was friends with somebody; either way, he was jerking the machine around like it was his first day at Queens Vo-Tech”
― Douglas Preston, quote from The Cabinet of Curiosities
“Boxer altered his course subtly, as if that was the way he'd already been going, not looking up to acknowledge he had heard, letting his attitude convey the contempt he felt for the scrawny foreman. He stopped in front of the guy, staring at the man's dusty little workboots. Small feet, small dick. Slowly, he glanced up. "Welcome to the world, Pee-Wee. Take a look at this.”
― Douglas Preston, quote from The Cabinet of Curiosities
“If you’re honest with yourself, you can still feel the terrible weight of time pressing on you; that awful, relentless, bodily corruption that is happening constantly to us all.”
― Douglas Preston, quote from The Cabinet of Curiosities
“There is an old French curse: may your fondest wish come true. If this treatment is cheap and available to everyone, it will destroy the earth through overpopulation. If it is dear and available only to the very rich, it will cause riots, wars, a breakdown of the social contract. Either way, it will lead directly to human misery. What is the value of a long life, when it is lived in squalor and unhappiness?”
― Douglas Preston, quote from The Cabinet of Curiosities
Douglas Preston
Born place: in Cambridge, Massachusetts, The United States
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“overgrown fields, obviously abandoned. We must be getting close to the next village, which was just as well. The sun was approaching the horizon, and the constant battle with the wind was exhausting for us as well as the horses. Fierce”
― Kiran Millwood Hargrave, quote from The Girl of Ink and Stars
“I have decided to sleep under the stars... Tonight heaven is my roof, and the hedges my walls... The field folds me in soft wings.”
― John Lewis-Stempel, quote from Meadowland: the private life of an English field
“A measure of the strength of a body's gravity is the speed with which a projectile must be fired to escape its grasp. It takes 11.2 kilometers per second to escape from the Earth. This speed is tiny compared with that of light, 300,000 kilometers per second, but it challenges rocket engineers constrained to use chemical fuel, which converts only a billionth of its so-called mass 'rest-mass energy' (Einstein's mc^2) into effective power. The escape velocity from the sun's surface is 600 kilometers per second-still only one fifth of one percent of the speed of light.”
― Martin J. Rees, quote from Just Six Numbers: The Deep Forces That Shape the Universe
“The meaning of life — that is something for a simpler time.”
― Mark Rowlands, quote from The Philosopher and the Wolf: Lessons from the Wild on Love, Death, and Happiness
“Men are so easily drawn to fake things.”
― Lisa Lutz, quote from The Passenger
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