Mary Roach quotes

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)
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. View quote
Mary Roach
All good research-whether for science or for a book-is a form of obsession. View quote
Mary Roach
You are a person and then you cease to be a person, and a cadaver takes your place. View quote
Mary Roach
Yes, the money could be better spent on Earth. But would it? Since when has money saved by government redlining been spent on education and cancer research? It is always squandered. Let's squander some on Mars. Let's go out and play. View quote
Mary Roach
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. View quote
Mary Roach
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. View quote
Mary Roach
Many people will find this book disrespectful. There is nothing amusing about being dead, they will say. Ah, but there is. View quote
Mary Roach
I dont 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. View quote
Mary Roach
Death. It doesn't have to be boring. View quote
Mary Roach
It is the mind that speaks a woman's heart, not the vaginal walls. (Mary Roach)
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. View quote
Mary Roach
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. View quote
Mary Roach
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. View quote
Mary Roach
I had a bike accident a few years ago, and I went to the emergency room, and I had to have a gash sewn up. And I am the kind of person that I was sitting up fascinated, watching, to the extent that the doctor said, 'Do you want to do a couple of stitches? You seem to be very interested.' View quote
Mary Roach
Gravitation is the lust of the cosmos. View quote
Mary Roach
I used to do my best thinking while staring out airplane windows. The seat-back video system put a stop to that. Now I sit and watch old' Friends' and 'Everybody Loves Raymond' episodes. Walking is good, but here again, technology has interfered. I like to listen to iTunes while I walk home. I guess I don't think anymore. View quote
Mary Roach
Animals' taste systems are specialized for the niche they occupy in the environment. That includes us. As hunters and foragers of the dry savannah, our earliest forebears evolved a taste for important but scarce nutrients: salt and high-energy fats and sugars. That, in a nutshell, explains the widespread popularity of junk food. View quote
Mary Roach
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. View quote
Mary Roach
If you could really guarantee that the money would be spent on something more worthwhile, I'd say, absolutely, scrap the space program, but it never works that way. View quote
Mary Roach
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)
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. View quote
Mary Roach
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. View quote
Mary Roach
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. View quote
Mary Roach
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. View quote
Mary Roach