Mary Roach Quotes

#1. 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

#2. Mushy food is a form of sensory deprivation. In the same way that a dark, silent room will eventually drive you to hallucinate, the mind rebels against bland, single-texture foods, edibles that do not engage the oral device.

Mary Roach

#3. You are a person and then you cease to be a person, and a cadaver takes your place.

Mary Roach

#4. 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

#5. 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

#6. The Internet is a boon for hypochondriacs like me.

Mary Roach

#7. Why don't suicide bombers smuggle bombs in their rectums?

Mary Roach

#8. The human liver is a boss-looking organ.

Mary Roach

#9. 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

#10. Monkeys offer an unadulterated demonstration of the power of hormones, as the females are not concerned about pregnancy or what their friends will think.

Mary Roach

#11. 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

#12. 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

#13. You don't need proof. You just need an inclination

Mary Roach

#14. The human organism is built for tension and relaxation, work and sleep. The principle of life is rhythm.

Mary Roach

#15. Softball is the reason Washing Machines and Bleach are so popular. Don't think so? Just ask a softball Mom.

Mary Roach

#16. 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

#17. 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

#18. 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

#19. Literally thousands of e-mails over the course of a book go out to people I've never met, people who might end up being the focus of a chapter.

Mary Roach

#20. To me, death is dark, pain, grief.

Mary Roach

#21. Compressed into boxes, packed in sawdust, ... trussed up in sacks, roped up like hams ...

Mary Roach

#22. 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

#23. 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

#24. The writing is always the easy part, provided I can get the good material. It's the getting of the good material that's a challenge.

Mary Roach

#25. It seems odd to think of tasting without any perceptive experience, but you are doing it right now. Humans have taste receptor cells in the gut, the voice box, the upper esophagus. But only the tongue's receptors report to the brain.

Mary Roach

#26. 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

#27. How is it that we find Christina Aguilera more interesting than the inside of our own bodies?

Mary Roach

#28. As when astronaut Mike Mulhane was asked by a NASA psychiatrist what epitaph he'd like to have on his gravestone, Mulhane answered, "A loving husband and devoted father," though in reality, he jokes in "Riding Rockets," "I would have sold my wife and children into slavery for a ride into space.

Mary Roach

#29. 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

#30. 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

#31. 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

#32. Space doesn't just encompass the sublime and the ridiculous. It erases the line between.

Mary Roach

#33. 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

#34. The way I see it, being dead is not terribly far off from being on a cruise ship. Most of your time is spent lying on your back. The brain has shut down. The flesh begins to soften. Nothing much new happens, and nothing is expected of you.

Mary Roach

#35. 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

#36. 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

#37. A space station is a rangy monstrosity, a giant erector set built by a madman.

Mary Roach

#38. 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

#39. Death. It doesn't have to be boring.

Mary Roach

#40. 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

#41. 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

#42. 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

#43. The human head is of the same approximate size and weight as a roaster chicken. I have never before had occasion to make the comparison, for never before today have I seen a head in a roasting pan.

Mary Roach

#44. I get really excited about specific therapies, personalized therapies. Like, let's say, taking a piece of someone's tumor and testing a bunch of treatments in a lab and being able to come up with the right therapy for that specific patient.

Mary Roach

#45. It is the mind that speaks a woman's heart, not the vaginal walls.

Mary Roach

#46. The paper does not provide the exact number of penises eaten by ducks, but the author says there have been enough over the years to prompt the coining of a popular saying: 'I better get home or the ducks will have something to eat.

Mary Roach

#47. 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

#48. 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

#49. Editors are more concerned with the first chapters of a book; that's what everyone reads first in the bookstore or in the online sample.

Mary Roach

#50. NASA might do well to adopt the Red Bull approach to branding and astronautics. Suddenly the man in the spacesuit is not an underpaid civil servant; he's the ultimate extreme athlete. Red Bull knows how to make space hip.

Mary Roach

#51. 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

#52. The broader the topic, the easier it is, not only to fill a book, but to set the bar pretty high for really great stuff.

Mary Roach

#53. Is it possible to bolster one's hip bones by doing some type of controlled fall? Here

Mary Roach

#54. 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

#55. 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

#56. 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

#57. 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

#58. 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

#59. The slang for the rectum is "prison wallet".

Mary Roach

#60. Eighty percent of flavor comes from your nose, including a set of internal nostrils. When you chew food and hold it in your mouth, the gases that are released goes into these nostrils. People who wolf their food are missing some of the flavor.

Mary Roach

#61. Gravity is why there are suns and planets in the first place. It is practically God.

Mary Roach

#62. The feminist in me, who is small and sleeps a lot but can be scrappy when provoked, took umbrage at this description.

Mary Roach

#63. Every mode of travel has its signature mental aberration.

Mary Roach

#64. People are vomiting unrealistically in movies, and something must be done about it.

Mary Roach

#65. Gravitation is the lust of the cosmos.

Mary Roach

#66. Heterosexuals failed to grasp that if you lost yourself in the tease - in the pleasure and power of turning someone on - that that could be as arousing as being teased and turned on oneself.

Mary Roach

#67. 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

#68. Sometimes courage is nothing more than a willingness to think differently than those around you. In a culture of conformity, that's braver than it sounds.

Mary Roach

#69. In my experience, the most staunchly held views are based on ignorance or accepted dogma, not carefully considered accumulations of facts. The more you expose the intricacies and realtities of the situation, the less clear-cut things become.

Mary Roach

#70. 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

#71. 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

#72. 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

#73. 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

#74. 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

#75. What I am getting at is that there is a point at which efficiency crosses over into lunacy, and the savings in money or resources cease to be worthwhile in light of the price paid in other ways.

Mary Roach

#76. Masters points out that the heterosexuals were at a disadvantage, as they do not benefit from what he called "gender empathy". Doing unto your partner as you would do unto yourself only works well when you're gay.

Mary Roach

#77. It is difficult to put words to the smell of decomposing human. It is dense and cloying, sweet but not flower-sweet. Halfway between rotting fruit and rotting meat.

Mary Roach

#78. Wisdom comes with age, but keep it to yourself.

Mary Roach

#79. (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

#80. The researchers concluded that during intercourse in the missionary position, the penis has the shape of a boomerang.

Mary Roach

#81. No man got an erection from looking at "brown string sandals.

Mary Roach

#82. People blanch to see "fish meal" or "meat meal" on a pet-food ingredient panel, but meal
which variously includes organs, heads, skin, and bones
most closely resembles the diet of dogs and cats in the wild. Muscle meat is a grand source of protein, but comparatively little else.

Mary Roach

#83. There wasn't an anhydrous lacrimal gland in the house, writes the author in all seriousness describing a memorial service for a medical school's cadavers.

Mary Roach

#84. I have not eaten a lot of insects. I ate a termite in Africa, but it was on a bet. It was a soldier termite. It was alive, and I don't really recommend the live soldier termite as something you want to start with if you're going to start exploring eating insects.

Mary Roach

#85. 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

#86. Death doesn't have to be boring.

Mary Roach

#87. A bright light at the end of a tunnel can seem warm and inviting, or it can seem mysterious and terrifying. People of the world "all working on their arts and crafts" can seem like heaven or, if you're me, hell.

Mary Roach

#88. Every crazy fad from the 1800s comes back or they never go away. It's like fashion, like everything's already been invented, and somebody stumbles onto it and people will always, always be looking for an answer for some vague illness they can't get a diagnosis for.

Mary Roach

#89. 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

#90. 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

#91. Saliva has antibacterial properties. It also has things called nerve growth factor, skin growth factor, histatins which help with wound closure. So when you see an animal licking a wound or even a mom kissing a child's boo-boo, there's some, there's some good science behind why one might do this.

Mary Roach

#92. For the most part, if somebody approaches me and says, 'I'd like to interview you,' who am I to say no, when I spend all my days going, 'Hello, you don't know me. I'd like to ask you some questions. Do you have a little time?'

Mary Roach

#93. There is one thing dead people excel at. They're

Mary Roach

#94. Ultimately, the problem is that sex is perceived as a personal, intimate thing, not in the realm of science. But that's not true. It's physiology; it's anatomy. It deserves to be studied.

Mary Roach

#95. I write with a sense of my future readers being ever on the verge of setting down the book and pronouncing it a bore. Fear and insecurity are great motivators.

Mary Roach

#96. I think that the women's magazines and a lot of those quick tips for better sex, I think that they do people a disservice, sometimes, because they become very focused on - they're thinking, 'Okay, I read that I should do this, and am I doing it right?'

Mary Roach

#97. Hydromedusa tectifera are, like post-war Nazis, native to Argentina, Paraguay, and Brazil.

Mary Roach

#98. 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

#99. 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

#100. No one goes out to play anymore. Simulation is becoming reality.

Mary Roach