Seeing as I’ve been reading so many books at a rapid pace due to one of the classes I’ve been taking, I figured that since I don’t necessarily have the time to write a book review right now, I could at least mention a few of my favorite quotes.
What you will figure out very quickly is this class’s selection is primarily disease or plague based (gee I wonder why.) The first book in that selection was, “The Hot Zone,” by Richard Preston, which is a nonfiction written in the style of a thriller. It’s a very detailed account of the origins of the Ebola virus and how it almost became a disaster in the United States in the 90’s. Granted, it’s a lot more interesting and definitely more terrifying than that, but I’ll save my thoughts on the book itself for the review.
I chose a lot of quotes (besides the entire first chapter) that terrified me the most. If you are not a fan of disease related content, gore, and/or horrifying content, I suggest you don’t read this seeing as some of these quotes are very graphic in nature.
“The case of Charles Monet emerges in a cold geometry of clinical fact mixed with flashes of horror so brilliant and disturbing we draw back and blink, as if we are staring into a discolored alien sun.”
“…and from the moment Ebola enters your bloodstream, the war is already lost; you are most certainly doomed. You can’t fight off Ebola the way you fight off a cold. Ebola does in 10 days what it takes AIDS ten years to accomplish.”
“They were two human primates carrying another primate. One was the master of the earth, or at least believed himself to be, and the other was a nimble dweller in trees, a cousin of the master of the earth. Both species, the human and the monkey, were in the presence of another life form, which was older and more powerful than either of them, and was a dweller in blood.”
“The Ebola virus, in its Sudan incarnation, retreated to the heart of the bush, where undoubtedly it lives to this day, cycling and cycling in some unknown host, able to shift its shape, able to mutate and become a new thing, with the potential to enter the human species in a new form.”
“The mothers was dying of Ebola and had given the virus to her unborn baby. The fetus had evidently crashed and bled out inside the mother’s womb. The woman then absorbed spontaneously, and the nun who assisted at this grotesque delivery came away from the experience with blood on her hands. The blood of the mother and the fetus was radiantly hot, and the nun must have had a small break or cut on the skin of her hands. She developed an explosive infection and was dead in five days.”
“Isn’t it true that if you stare into the eyes of a cobra, the fear has another side to it? The fear is lessened as you begin to see the essence of the beauty. Looking at Ebola under an electron microscope is like looking at a gorgeously wrought ice castle. The thing is so cold. So totally pure.”
“If you bleed into the first space, you bleed into your lungs. If you bleed into the second space you bleed into your stomach and intestines. If you bleed into the third space, you bleed into the space between the skin and the flesh. The skin puffs up and separates from the flesh like a bag. Peter Cardinal had bled out under his skin.”
“Peter Cardinal’s parents and sister were stunned as they watched him being slowly torn apart by the invisible predator. They could not comprehend his suffering or reach him to give him comfort. As the blood poured into his third space, his eyes remained open and dilated, staring, bloody, deep, dark, and bottomless. They didn’t know if he could see them, and they couldn’t tell what he saw or thought or felt behind the open eyes. The machines hooked up to his scalp were showing flatlines in his brain. There was very little electrical activity in his brain, but now and then, the flatlines gave a spooky twitch, as if something continued to struggle inside the boy, some destroyed fragment of his soul.”
“To be a good soldier you must love the army. But to be a good officer you must be willing to order the death of the thing you love. That is…a very hard thing to do. No other profession requires it. That is one reason why there are so few very good officers. Although there are many good men.”
“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, the dead spots of concrete all over the planet, the cancerous rot-outs in Europe, Japan, and the United States, thick with replicating primates, the colonies enlarging and spreading and threatening to shock the biosphere with mass extinctions.”
“Whether the human race can actually maintain a population of five billion or more without a crash with a hot virus remains an open question. Unanswered. The answers are hidden in the labyrinth of tropical ecosystems. AIDS is the revenge of the rainforest. It may be only the beginning.”
rachel hall 