Mary Roach quotes are thought-provoking, memorable and inspiring. From views on society and politics to thoughts on love and life, Mary Roach has a lot to say. In this list we present the 67 best Mary Roach quotes, in no particular order. Let yourself get inspired!
(And check out our page with Mary Roach quotes per category if you only want to read quotes from a certain category, such as funny, life, love, politics, and more).
Mary Roach quotes
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.
— Mary Roach, Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers
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, Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void
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, Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers
Many people will find this book disrespectful. There is nothing amusing about being dead, they will say. Ah, but there is.
— Mary Roach, Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers
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?
— Mary Roach, Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife
Not that there’s anything wrong with just lying around on your back. In it’s way, rotting is interesting too, as we will see. It’s just that there are other ways to spend your time as a cadaver.
— Mary Roach, Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers
There wasn’t an anhydrous lacrimal gland in the room…
— Mary Roach, Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers
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, Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal
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, Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex
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, Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife
I am very much out of my element here. There are moments, listening to the conversations going on around me, when I feel I am going to lose my mind. Earlier today, I heard someone say the words, “I felt at one with the divine source of creation.” Mary Roach on a conducted tour of Hades. I had to fight the urge to push back my chair and start screaming: STAND BACK! ALL OF YOU! I’VE GOT AN ARTHUR FINDLAY BOX CUTTER! Instead, I quietly excused myself and went to the bar, to commune with spirits I know how to relate to.
— Mary Roach, Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife
Footnote: In 1998, a woman in Saline, Michigan received a patent for a Decorative Penile Wrap…The patent included three pages of drawings, including a penis wearing a ghost outfit, another in the robes of the Grim Reaper, and one dressed up to look like a snowman.
— Mary Roach, Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex
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.
— Mary Roach, Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers
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, Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal
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.
— Mary Roach, Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers
There, just beyond his open palm, was our mother’s face. I wasn’t expecting it. We hadn’t requested a viewing, and the memorial service was closed-coffin. We got it anyway. They’d shampooed and waved her hair and made up her face. They’d done a great job, but I felt taken, as if we’d asked for the basic carwash and they’d gone ahead and detailed her. Hey, I wanted to say, we didn’t order this. But of course I said nothing. Death makes us helplessly polite.
— Mary Roach, Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers
think of it.’ said Robert Rosenbluth, a doctor whose acquaintance i made at the start of this book. ‘no engineer could design something as multifunctional and fine tuned as an anus. to call someone an asshole is really bragging him up.
— Mary Roach, Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal
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, Grunt: The Curious Science of Humans at War
It’s possible that the reason I’ve never experienced a ghostly presence is that my temporal lobes aren’t wired for it. It could well be that the main difference between skeptics (Susan Blackmore notwithstanding) and believers is the neural structure they were born with. But the question still remains: Are these people whose EMF-influenced brains alert them to “presences” picking up something real that the rest of us can’t pick up, or are they hallucinating? Here again, we must end with the Big Shrug, a statue of which is being erected on the lawn outside my office.
— Mary Roach, Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife
The slang for the rectum is “prison wallet”.
— Mary Roach, Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal
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, Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void
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, Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal
During World War II, when combat rations were tinned, meat hashes were a common entrée because they worked well with the filling machines. “But the men wanted something they could chew, something into which they could ‘sink their teeth, ’” wrote food scientist Samuel Lepkovsky in a 1964 paper making the case against a liquid diet for the Gemini astronauts. He summed up the soldiers’ take on potted meat: “We could undoubtedly survive on these rations a lot longer than we’d care to live.” (NASA went ahead and tested an all-milkshake meal plan on groups of college students living in a simulated space capsule at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in 1964. A significant portion of it ended up beneath the floorboards.)
— Mary Roach, Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal
With the rise of classical Greece, the soul debate evolved into the more familiar heart-versus-brain, the liver having been demoted to an accessory role. We are fortunate that this is so, for we would otherwise have been faced with Celine Dion singing “My Liver Belongs to You” and movie houses playing The Liver Is a Lonely Hunter. Every Spanish love song that contains the word corazon, which is all of them, would contain the somewhat less lilting higado, and bumper stickers would proclaim, “I [liver symbol] my Pekingese.
— Mary Roach, Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers
It tastes like water spiked with strange.
— Mary Roach, Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal
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, Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal
While he attends to his rats, Persinger gives me the lowdown on the haunt theory. Why would a certain type of electromagnetic field make one hear things or sense a presence? What’s the mechanism? The answer hinges on the fact that exposure to electromagnetic fields lowers melatonin levels. Melatonin, he explains, is an anti-convulsive; if you have less of it in your system, your brain —in particular, your right temporal lobe— will be more prone to tiny epileptic-esque microseizures and the subtle hallucinations these seizures can cause.
— Mary Roach, Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife
Constipation ran Presley’s life. Even his famous motto TCB— ’Taking Care of Business’— sounds like a reference to bathroom matters.
— Mary Roach, Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal
It’s called the FATLOSE trail. FATLOSE stands for ‘Fecal Administration To LOSE weight, ‘ an example of PLEASE— Pretty Lame Excuse for an Acronym, Scientists and Experimenters.
— Mary Roach, Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal
What sort of person experimentally infests a child with maggots? A confident sort, certainly. A maverick. Someone comfortable with the unpretty facts of biology. Someone who is perhaps himself an unpretty fact of biology.
— Mary Roach, Grunt: The Curious Science of Humans at War
People are messy, unpredictable things.
— Mary Roach, Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal
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, Grunt: The Curious Science of Humans at War
The human organism is built for tension and relaxation, work and sleep. The principle of life is rhythm.
— Mary Roach, Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void
There is her heart. I’ve never seen one beating.I had no idea they moved so much. You put your hand on your heart and you picture something pulsing slightly but basically still, like a hand on a desktop tapping Morse code. This things is going wild in there. It’s a mixing-machine part, a stoat squirming in its burrow, an alien life form that’s just won a Pontiac on The Price Is Right. If you were looking for the home of the human body’s animating spirit, I could imagine believing it to be here, for the simple reason that it is the human body’s most animated organ.
— Mary Roach, Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers
Hormones are nature’s three bottles of beer.
— Mary Roach, Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex
Homo sapiens is one of the few species on earth that care if they’re seen having sex. The impala is unconcerned. The dingo roundly flaunts it. A masturbating chimpanzee will stare straight at you. To any creature other than you and I and 6 billion other privacy-needing H. sapiens, sex is like peeling a mango or scratching your ear. It’s just something you do sometimes.
— Mary Roach, Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex
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, Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex
Viagra isn’t the only drug being prescribed off-label for women with arousal problems. Los Angeles urologist Jennifer Berman told me some doctors are prescribing low doses of Ritalin. Drugs like Ritalin improve a person’s focus, so it stands to reason that it would make it easier to stay attuned to subtle changes taking place in one’s body. ‘It enables a woman to focus o the task at hand, ‘ said Berman, managing, though surely not intending, to make sex sound like homework.
— Mary Roach, Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex
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, Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife
You don’t need proof. You just need an inclination
— Mary Roach, Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife
Every mode of travel has its signature mental aberration.
— Mary Roach, Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void
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, Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal
Borman’s dumping urine. Urine [in] approximately one minute.” Two lines further along, we see Lovell saying, “What a sight to behold!
— Mary Roach, Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void
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.
— Mary Roach, Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers
To the rocket scientist, you are a problem. You are the most irritating piece of machinery he or she will ever have to deal with. You and your fluctuating metabolism, your puny memory, your frame that comes in a million different configurations. You are unpredictable. You’re inconstant. You take weeks to fix. The engineer must worry about the water and oxygen and food you’ll need in space, about how much extra fuel it will take to launch your shrimp cocktail and irradiated beef tacos. A solar cell or a thruster nozzle is stable and undemanding. It does not excrete or panic or fall in love with the mission commander. It has no ego. Its structural elements don’t start to break down without gravity, and it works just fine without sleep.To me, you are the best thing to happen to rocket science. The human being is the machine that makes the whole endeavor so endlessly intriguing.
— Mary Roach, Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void
It is the mind that speaks a woman’s heart, not the vaginal walls.
— Mary Roach, Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex
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, Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers
compressed into boxes, packed in sawdust, … trussed up in sacks, roped up like hams…
— Mary Roach, Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers
cadavers’ intestines hanging like a parade streamers off the sides of tables, skulls bobbing in boiling pots, organs strewn on the floor being eaten by dogs…..
— Mary Roach, Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers
No one goes out to play anymore. Simulation is becoming reality.
— Mary Roach, Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void
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
…he was doing a breath hydrogen test. If you know the amount of hydrogen someone is exhaling orally, it’s a simple matter to extrapolate the amount they’re exhaling rectally. This is because a fixed percentage of hydrogen produced in the colon is absorbed into the blood and, and when it reaches the lungs, exhaled. The breath hydrogen test has given flatus researchers a simple, consistent measure of gas production that does not require the subject to fart into a balloon.
— Mary Roach, Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal
All good research-whether for science or for a book-is a form of obsession.
— Mary Roach
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
I don’t read good books anymore, it seems; I just buy them and put them on the shelf and every now and then walk over and pet them. I’m like the optimistic dieter who fills her closet with clothes two sizes too small and dreams of the day she can wear them. I know just what I want to do when I retire.
— Mary Roach
Picking my topics is sort of a process of elimination for me. Most things don’t work for me. I like to cover science and unexpected things happening in labs. Also, theoretical research doesn’t work for my style. I need scenes and interactions. Then, humor. I’m having the most fun when I can have fun with my work.
— Mary Roach
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
Weightlessness was unbelievable. It’s physical euphoria: Nothing about you has any weight. You don’t realize that you are weighed down all the time by yourself, and your organs, and your head. Your arms weigh down your shoulders. In space simulation, you get to fly like Superman! You’re hanging in the air! It’s the coolest thing.
— Mary Roach
To keep your he-man jaw muscles from smashing your precious teeth, the only set you have, the body evolved an automated braking system faster and more sophisticated than anything on a Lexus. The jaw knows its own strength. The faster and more recklessly you close your mouth, the less force the muscles are willing to apply.
— Mary Roach
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
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
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.
— Mary Roach
Most of us pass our lives never once laying eyes on our own organs, the most precious and amazing things we own. Until something goes wrong, we barely give them thought. This seems strange to me. How is it that we find Christina Aguilera more interesting than the inside of our own bodies?
— Mary Roach
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
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
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
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.
— Mary Roach
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
English
Arabic
Chinese (Simplified)
Dutch
French
German
Italian
Portuguese
Russian
Spanish