Mary Roach Quotes

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.

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.

It would be especially comforting to believe that I have the answer to the question, What happens when we die? Does the light just go out and that's that-the million-year nap? Or will some part of my personality, my me-ness, persist? What will that feel like? What will I do all day? Is there a place to plug in my laptop?

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.

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.

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.

My books are not really books; theyre 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.

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.

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.

Many people will find this book disrespectful. There is nothing amusing about being dead, they will say. Ah, but there is.

Death. It doesn't have to be boring.

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.

The terms "idiot" and "lunatic" were acceptable diagnostic terms in England up until 1959. "Imbecile" and "feeble-minded person" were, likewise, listed as official categories in the 1913 Mental Deficiency Act. England has always lagged a bit behind in discarding outdated terms for the disadvantaged. When I was there in 1980, it was still possible to shop for used clothing at the local Spastic Shop. That is, compared to the United States, where it takes, oh, about twenty-five minutes for a diagnostic euphemism to become a conversational faux pas.

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.

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.

Sexual desire is a state not unlike hunger.

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.

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

Sharing a room with a cadaver is only mildly different from being in a room alone. They are the same sort of company as people across from you on subways or in airport lounges, there but not there. Your eyes keep going back to them, for lack of anything more interesting to look at, and then you feel bad for staring.

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.

Here is the secret to surviving one of these [airplane] crashes: Be male. In a 1970 Civil Aeromedical institute study of three crashes involving emergency evacuations, the most prominent factor influencing survival was gender (followed closely by proximity to exit). Adult males were by far the most likely to get out alive. Why? Presumably because they pushed everyone else out of the way.

All good research-whether for science or for a book-is a form of obsession.

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.

Wisdom comes with age, but keep it to yourself.

I very much was inspired by Bill Bryson. He does cover science, but more often, it's a mixture of science and travel, and whatever he happens to be writing about - Shakespeare, Australia, the United Kingdom, or when he covers science in 'A Short History Of Nearly Everything' - he has an incredible ability to be both entertaining and enlightening.

Viagra does have a physiological effect, but it doesn't make women feel aroused. Nowadays, researchers are looking at drugs that affect the central nervous system rather than blood flow to the genitals.

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?

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)

Normally I object to strangers beaming force fields into my brain.

Bodily fluids and solids are universally the most disgusting things we as human beings can come upon, but as long as they are inside us, it's part of you.

Hormones are nature's three bottles of beer.

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.

Worry lives a long way from rational thought."---Self

I walk up and down the rows. The heads look like rubber halloween masks. They also look like human heads, but my brain has no precedent for human heads on tables or in roasting pans or anywhere other than on top of a human bodies, and so I think it has chosen to interpret the sight in a more comforting manner. - Here we are at the rubber mask factory. Look at the nice men and woman working on the masks.

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.

It is astounding to me, and achingly sad, that with eighty thousand people on the waiting list for donated hearts and livers and kidneys, with sixteen a day dying there on that list, that more then half of the people in the position H's family was in will say no, will choose to burn those organs or let them rot. We abide the surgeon's scalpel to save our own lives, out loved ones' lives, but not to save a stranger's life. H has no heart, but heartless is the last thing you'd call her.

Instead, I quietly excused myself and went to the bar, to commune with spirits I know how to relate to.

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.)

Every mode of travel has its signature mental aberration.

I began thinking about my skeleton, this solid, beautiful thing inside me that I would never see.

In 'Packing for Mars,' I tried to convey the importance of getting young people interested in science.

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.

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.

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

The point is that no matter what you choose to do with your body when you die, it won't, ultimately, be very appealing. If you are inclined to donate yourself to science, you should not let images of dissection or dismemberment put you off. They are no more or less gruesome, in my opinion, than ordinary decay or the sewing shut of your jaws via your nostrils for a funeral viewing.

Yet if you don't understand the physiology of a biological system or process-like female sexual arousal-you can't possibly come up with a way to fix it when things go wrong. No one would have come up with a treatment for diabetes if physiologists hadn't figured out how metabolism, blood sugar, and insulin work.

There are people who would love to spend their last ten years, or five years, or whatever it is, on the surface of Mars.

One young woman's tribute describes unwrapping her cadaver's hands and being brought up short by the realization that the nails were painted pink. "The pictures in the anatomy atlas did not show nail polish", she wrote. "Did you choose the color? Did you think that I would see it? I wanted to tell you about the inside of your hands. I want you to know you are always there when I see patients. When I palpate an abdomen, yours are the organs I imagine. When I listen to a heart, I recall holding your heart.