Top 100 Mary Roach Quotes
#1. He recovers and seems to possess all his earlier faculties, with one exception: the formerly mild-mannered Gage is now something of a hellion, an impulsive shit-starter.
Mary Roach
#2. Spacewalking is a little like rock climbing in that everything, including and especially oneself, must be tethered or docked at all times. If you forget to tether a tool, it's gone. Ditto yourself.
Mary Roach
#3. I don't fear death so much as I fear its prologues: loneliness, decrepitude, pain, debilitation, depression, senility. After a few years of those, I imagine death presents like a holiday at the beach.
Mary Roach
#4. It's this mood, these sentiments - the excitement of exploration and the surprises and delights of travel to foreign locales - that I hope to inspire with this book.
Mary Roach
#5. I've read plenty of amazing science pieces where the writers don't hang out in labs. I just have fun doing it. And I get rewarded for it; I get gushy, especially when kids tell me they expected to be bored by my books, but weren't.
Mary Roach
#6. I don't know of many people who've done sex research with an eye toward people saying sex is bad for you, except for the promiscuity and cervical cancer link - which is actually a valid discovery.
Mary Roach
#7. Pearsall is not a doctor, or not, at least, one of the medical variety. He is a doctor of the variety that gets a Ph.D. and attaches it to his name on self-help book covers.
Mary Roach
#8. LOL is rarely OL, or even really L. A real out-loud laugh - not the forced social variety, which is closer to barking than laughing - is uncommon among adults.
Mary Roach
#9. The slang for the rectum is "prison wallet".
Mary Roach
#10. US government button specifications run to twenty-two pages. This fact on its own yields a sense of what it is like to design garments for the Army.
Mary Roach
#11. My books are not really books; they're endless chains of distraction shoved inside a cover. Many of them begin at the search box of Pub Med, an Internet database of medical journal articles.
Mary Roach
#12. I think by and large, humans prefer to think of themselves as minds from the neck up. We don't really like to think of ourselves as another animal, another digesting, excreting, mating, snoring, sleeping kind of sack of guts. I don't think we like that. I think we'd rather not be reminded of it.
Mary Roach
#13. It began with meetings, five months before the Apollo 11 launch. The newly formed Committee on Symbolic Activities for the First Lunar Landing gathered to debate the appropriateness of planting a flag on the moon.
Mary Roach
#14. This book is a tribute to the men and women who dared. Who, to this day, endure ignorance, closed minds, righteousness, and prudery. Their lives are not easy. But their cocktail parties are the best. p
Mary Roach
#15. Morning breath is hydrogen sulfide released by bacteria consuming shed tongue cells while you mouth-breathe for eight hours; saliva normally washes the debris away.
Mary Roach
#16. Back in the 1980s when everyone looked a bit off, my friend Tim and his brothers had some publicity shots taken of their band. Eventually they sold the rights to a stock photo agency. Years later, one of the images turned up on a greeting card. The inside said, Greetings from the Dork Club.
Mary Roach
#17. Hydromedusa tectifera are, like post-war Nazis, native to Argentina, Paraguay, and Brazil.
Mary Roach
#18. There is one thing dead people excel at. They're
Mary Roach
#19. For the scientists, they're kind of puzzled and pleased that somebody finds their work interesting. It makes it fun for me. I feel like I've sort of turned over a stone that hasn't been turned over.
Mary Roach
#20. Chew on this: Human teeth can detect a grain of sand or grit 10 microns in diameter. A micron is 1/25,000 of an inch. If you shrank a Coke can until it was the diameter of a human hair, the letter O in the product name would be about 10 microns across.
Mary Roach
#21. (What she perhaps didn't realize is that the embalming fluid pumped into the veins expands the body's erectile tissues, with the result that male anatomy lab cadavers may be markedly better endowed in death than they were in life.)
Mary Roach
#22. Wisdom comes with age, but keep it to yourself.
Mary Roach
#23. Death. It doesn't have to be boring.
Mary Roach
#24. Most of the people who are engaged in the subjects that I look into are pretty interesting. Whether its sex researchers or someone who's devoted their career to saliva or somebody who does research with cadavers, there's an inherent fascination in the subject matter of their work.
Mary Roach
#25. An anatomy lab is as choosy as a pedigreed woman seeking love: You can't be too fat or too tall or have any communicable diseases.
Mary Roach
#26. Compressed into boxes, packed in sawdust, ... trussed up in sacks, roped up like hams ...
Mary Roach
#27. To me, death is dark, pain, grief.
Mary Roach
#28. When I'm done with a book, I always give it to someone with expertise in the topic and tell them to flag all of my stupid mistakes.
Mary Roach
#29. You do not question an author who appears on the title page as T.V.N. Persaud, M.D., Ph.D., D.Sc., F.R.C.Path. (Lond.), F.F.Path. (R.C.P.I.), F.A.C.O.G.
Mary Roach
#30. I remember watching Morin walk away from me, the endearing gait and the butt that got lubed for science, and thinking, 'Oh my god, they're just people.
Mary Roach
#31. In the words of the late Francis Crick ... You, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. (13)
Mary Roach
#32. When someone tells me, 'Oh, we have so many problems on Earth; space exploration costs too much money,' I say, 'I absolutely agree with you. But I still hope we do it.'
Mary Roach
#33. The human digestive tract is like the Amtrak line from Seattle to Los Angeles: transit time is about thirty hours, and the scenery on the last leg is pretty monotonous.
Mary Roach
#34. There are fast chewers and slow chewers, long chewers and short chewers, right-chewing people and left-chewing people. Some of us chew straight up and down, and others chew side-to-side, like cows. Your oral processing habits are a physiological fingerprint.
Mary Roach
#35. The human liver is a boss-looking organ.
Mary Roach
#36. Why don't suicide bombers smuggle bombs in their rectums?
Mary Roach
#37. The Internet is a boon for hypochondriacs like me.
Mary Roach
#38. What does this tell us about sharks? Should women be worried? Hard to say. How crazy are sharks for seal meat? Do dead groupers smell like used tampons? Unknown. I'd stay in my deck chair, if I were menstruating you.
Mary Roach
#39. He simply believed that lame sex destroyed more marriages than did anything else, and that "considering the inveterate marriage habit of the race," something ought to be done.
Mary Roach
#40. You are a person and then you cease to be a person, and a cadaver takes your place.
Mary Roach
#41. Meteorite hunting is not for wimps. The best places to look are also the coldest and windiest. You need very old ice, and you need wind, lots of it, strong and unrelenting. Antarctica fits the bill.
Mary Roach
#42. I am of the opinion that the vulva of Your Most Sacred Majesty should be titillated for some length of time before intercourse.
Mary Roach
#43. It is the mind that speaks a woman's heart, not the vaginal walls.
Mary Roach
#44. People don't appreciate their intestines until something goes wrong. But I always hope that people gain a little appreciation for their guts.
Mary Roach
#45. Every now and then, someone will tell me that one of my books has made them laugh out loud. I never believe them because: a.) my books don't make me laugh out loud; and b.) sometimes I have said this to a writer, when really what I meant was, 'Your book made me smile appreciatively.'
Mary Roach
#46. Heroism doesn't always happen in a burst of glory. Sometimes small triumphs and large hearts change the course of history. Sometimes a chicken can save a man's life.
Mary Roach
#47. To me, NASA is kind of the magical kingdom. I was sort of a geek, and you go there, and there are just these wondrously strange things and people.
Mary Roach
#48. I talk to a lot of people who, when you try to sum them up in a couple of sentences, seem like they must be insane.
Mary Roach
#49. A space station is a rangy monstrosity, a giant erector set built by a madman.
Mary Roach
#50. The suffix 'naut' comes from the Greek and Latin words for ships and sailing. Astronaut suggests 'a sailor in space.' Chimponaut suggests 'a chimpanzee in sailor pants'.
Mary Roach
#51. I'm drawn to the taboos that surround the human body. I find it fascinating that we are repelled by many of the acts and processes that keep us alive.
Mary Roach
#52. Few sciences are as rooted in shame, infamy, and bad PR as human anatomy. The troubles began in Alexandrian Egypt, circa 300 B.C. King Ptolemy I was the first leader to deem it a-okay for medical types to cut open the dead for the purpose of figuring out how bodies work.
Mary Roach
#53. Space doesn't just encompass the sublime and the ridiculous. It erases the line between.
Mary Roach
#54. If you lower your head to within a foot or two of an infested corpse - and this I truly don't recommend - you can hear them feeding. Arpad pinpoints the sound. "Rice Krispies." Ron frowns. Ron used to like Rice Krispies.
Mary Roach
#55. I don't write on topics that require a lot of urgency. But in 'Stiff,' I wanted to change people's hearts about organ donation. Whenever I get a chance, I try to talk about that.
Mary Roach
#56. There are people who would love to spend their last ten years, or five years, or whatever it is, on the surface of Mars.
Mary Roach
#57. I challenge you to find a more innocuous sentence containing the words sperm, suction, swallow, and any homophone of seaman. And then call me up on the homophone and read it to me.
Mary Roach
#58. He has a minor in explosives and the slightly bitter, misanthropic personality of someone who shouldn't.
Mary Roach
#59. The human brain most resembles that of Jersey cows at about six months."*
Mary Roach
#60. No one is excluded from the astronaut corps based on penis size.
Mary Roach
#61. (The Soviet space agency did not traditionally give cosmonauts steak and eggs before launch; it gave them a one-liter enema.) Fahey,
Mary Roach
#62. Mir astronaut Jerry Linenger writes in his memoir that he was surprised to find a bottle of cognac in one arm of his spacesuit and a bottle of whiskey in the other. (Linenger was the Frank Burns of space exploration:
Mary Roach
#63. I'm not a quick wit. I'm only funny on paper. I mean, I'm not totally humorless! It's just that in person, I'm not quite the way I am on paper.
Mary Roach
#64. If you don't have a pair of cadaver shoes, you're not doing enough research.
Mary Roach
#65. This is a book about notable achievements made while dead.
Mary Roach
#66. We were unable to obtain any lesbians, Pomeroy says, as though perhaps they hadn't been in season, or his paperwork wasn't in order.)
Mary Roach
#67. The act of vomiting deserves your respect. It's an orchestral event of the gut.
Mary Roach
#68. Life contains these things: leakage and wickage and discharge, pus and snot and slime and gleet. We are biology. We are reminded of this at the beginning and the end, at birth and at death. In between we do what we can to forget.
Mary Roach
#69. If ergonomists have their way, future products won't be built for some hypothetical average person but will conform to the biomechanical needs of whatever particular human body happens to come into contact with them.
Mary Roach
#70. Pet foods come in a variety of flavors because that's what humans like, and we assume our pets like what we like. We're wrong.
Mary Roach
#71. Upon the occasion of history's first manned flight - in the 1780's aboard the Montgolfier brothers' hot-air balloons - someone asked Franklin what use he saw in such frivolity. "What use," he replied, "is a newborn baby?
Mary Roach
#72. When I was 16, I had a job on the cleaning crew at a local hospital. I wore a pink uniform and cleaned bathrooms and buffed the hallway linoleum. Oddly, I don't recall hating the job. I recall getting choked up at the end of the summer when I went to turn in my uniform and say goodbye to the ladies.
Mary Roach
#73. One IGHS member said that, yup, she could hear it, too. Then again, during a dinner conversation earlier in the trip, this same woman heard "Siegfried and Roy" as "Sigmund Freud." The resulting image-Sigmund Freud with flowing hair and tigers and too much men's makeup-haunts me to this day.
Mary Roach
#74. Where do you find a stomach on a Thursday afternoon in Reno? "Chinatown?" suggests someone. "Costco?" "Butcher Boys." Tracy pulls his phone from a pocket. "Hello, I'm from the university" - the catchall preamble for unorthodox inquiries.
Mary Roach
#75. Moeller, who has tasted a naked Cheeto, likens it to a piece of unsweetened puffed corn cereal
Mary Roach
#76. We are all nature, all made of the same basic materials, with the same basic needs. We are no different, on a very basic level, from the ducks and the mussels and last week's coleslaw. Thus we should respect Nature, and when we die, we should give ourselves back to the earth.
Mary Roach
#77. I'm always imposing my taste in books on others. I hope that people enjoy being surprised by a book they might not otherwise read - I enjoy the surprise myself when others do this to me.
Mary Roach
#78. The anonymity of body parts facilitates the necessary dissociations of cadaveric research: This is not a person. This is just tissue. It has no feelings, and no one has feelings for it. It's okay to do things to it which, were it a sentient being, would constitute torture.
Mary Roach
#79. It's no coincidence that the man who contributed the most to the study of human anatomy, the Belgian Andreas Vesalius, was an avid proponent of do-it-yourself, get-your-fussy-Renaissance-shirt-dirty anatomical dissection.
Mary Roach
#80. This book is a salute to the scientists and the surgeons, running along in the wake of combat, lab coats flapping. Building safer tanks, waging war on filth flies. Understanding turkey vultures. T
Mary Roach
#81. I have a nice little office, with a nice little window in it, but I do basically spend huge amounts of time in what you could consider solitary confinement.
Mary Roach
#82. Breast milk and amniotic fluid carry the flavors of the mother's foods, and studies consistently show that babies grow up to be more accepting of flavors they've sampled while in the womb and while breastfeeding.
Mary Roach
#83. I've always been a bit of a space geek. I wrote an article years ago about the neutral buoyancy tank, which is this biblically sized pool where they train astronauts. And it was just the coolest thing.
Mary Roach
#85. When you buy my books, you kind of know what you're in for. It's kind of self-selecting. If you have a delicate sensibility, and you're easily grossed out, you probably will never read one of my books.
Mary Roach
#86. Normally I object to strangers beaming force fields into my brain.
Mary Roach
#87. Please beware," came his reply, "There are a lot of people who believe that just because we don't have an explanation for something, it's quantum mechanics.
Mary Roach
#88. Dr. Grime carries a Tide stain pen. He does not use his own spit. Art conservators do. "We make cotton swabs on bamboo sticks and moisten the swab in our mouths," says Andrea Chevalier, senior paintings conservator with the Intermuseum Conservation Association.
Mary Roach
#89. How about suicide rate. And what a shame to lose them after they've made it back. We keep them alive, but we don't teach them how to live.
Mary Roach
#90. Sexual desire is a state not unlike hunger.
Mary Roach
#91. A wedding gown entails multilayering of expensive specialty fabrics for an outfit whose useful lifespan may come and go in a single afternoon. Much like a bomb suit.
Mary Roach
#92. Hormones are nature's three bottles of beer.
Mary Roach
#93. You won't see me writing about particle physics, or even planetary geology, or chemistry. I practically failed chemistry, and if I had to write a book in any of those areas, I don't think it would go well.
Mary Roach
#94. And finally, my gratitude to UM 006, H, Mr. Blank, Ben, the big guy in the sweatpants, and the owners of the forty heads. You are dead, but you're not forgotten.
Mary Roach
#95. Science is you! It's your head, it's your dog, it's your iPhone - it's the world. How do you see that as boring? If it's boring, it's because you're learning it from a textbook.
Mary Roach
#96. People are messy, unpredictable things.
Mary Roach
#97. All the clothes in my closet are Oakland, California, clothes. You can't wear those anywhere else. The barometric pressure drops and then where are you?
Mary Roach
#98. Meaning 'by way of the anus'. 'Per Annum', with two n's, means 'yearly'. The correct answer to the question, 'What is the birthrate per anum?' is zero (one hopes).
Mary Roach
#99. Gravity disappears again, and we rise up off the floor like spooks from a grave. It's like the Rapture in here every thirty seconds.
Mary Roach
#100. The simplest strategy for bouts of noxious flatus is to not care. Or perhaps to take advantage of a gastroenterologist I know: get a dog. (To blame.)
Mary Roach
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