Mary Roach Quotes & Sayings

Anne Marie's beauty and style belie a down-and-dirty education in the particulars of practical AI (artificial insemination). She has miked a boar of his prodigious ejaculate
over two hundred milliliters (a cup), as compared to a man's three milliliters
and she has done it with her hand. For, unlike stallions and bulls, boars don't cotton to artificial vaginas. (in part, because their penis, like their tail, is corkscrewed.) AI techs must squeeze the organ in their hand
hard and without letup
for the entire duration of the ejaculation: from five to fifteen minutes. "You should see the size of their hands," she says, of the men and women who regular ejaculate boars. — Mary Roach

It's amazing what sometimes gets accomplished via an initially jarring but ultimately harmless shift in thinking. Is cutting the organs out of a dead man and stitching them into someone else barbaric and disrespectful, or is it a straightforward operation to save multiple lives? Does crapping into a Baggie while sitting 6 inches away from your crewmate represent a collapse of human dignity or a unique and comic form of intimacy? — Mary Roach

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

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

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

Of all the so-called variety meats, none presents a steeper challenge to the food persuader than the reproductive organs. Good luck to Deanna Pucciarelli, the woman who seeks to introduce mainstream America to the culinary joys of pig balls. "I am indeed working on a project on pork testicles," said Pucciarelli, director of the Hospitality and Food Management Program at - fill my heart with joy! - Ball State University. — Mary Roach

Astronauts are like these mythic legends, but really, they are just regular people, people who wear chinos. — Mary Roach

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

He told me that a German doctor named Wolff figured it out in the 1800s by studying X-rays of infants' hips as they transitioned from crawling to walking. "A whole new evolution of bone structure takes place to support the mechanical loads associated with walking," said Lang. "Wolff had the great insight that form follows function." Alas, Wolff did not have the great insight that cancer follows gratuitous X-raying with primitive nineteenth-century X-ray machines. — Mary Roach

Kinsey wanted Dellenback to film his own staff. There are three ways to read that sentence, all of them true. — Mary Roach

There is one thing dead people excel at. They're — Mary Roach

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. — Mary Roach

When you get right down to it, there is no dignified way to go, be it decomposition, incineration, dissection, tissue digestion, or composting. They're all, bottom line, a little disagreeable. It takes the careful application of a well-considered euphemism - burial, cremation, anatomical gift-giving, water reduction, ecological funeral - to bring it to the point of acceptance. — Mary Roach

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

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

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

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

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

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

SHOULD CIRCUMSTANCE PREVENT a man from carrying his cigarettes and cell phone in his pants pocket, the rectum provides a workable alternative. So workable that well over a thousand pounds of tobacco and hundreds of cell phones are rectally smuggled into California state prisons each year. The contraband allows incarcerated gang members and narcotics dealers to make business calls from behind bars (and to enjoy a smoke while doing so). — Mary Roach

The staff played hot potato with my call until someone could locate the Person in Charge of Lying to the Press. The PCLP said that the room that houses the base archives is locked. And that only the curator would have a key. And that Holloman currently has no curator. Evidently the new curator's first task would be to find a way to open the archives. — Mary Roach

In my whole life, I've never vomited from seeing something disgusting. Does it really even happen, outside of movies and TV? I believe it may be a myth. — Mary Roach

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

Gravity is why there are suns and planets in the first place. It is practically God. — Mary Roach

Will I switch to E-reading? I won't, mainly because I love the look and feel of books - particularly hardbacks. I love them enough to put up with the minor hassles of lugging them around and maneuvering them in my lap and having to set them aside while I eat my cheeseburger. — 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

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

Women who routinely have orgasm in intercourse without explicit clitoral stimulation all say that it makes little difference what the guy does, as long as he doesn't come too soon, — Mary Roach

When I was a kid, I hated everything. I was really skinny, and I'd have a milkshake with an egg in it. Growing up, I ate, like, five different foods. I was not an adventurous eater. But as soon as I left home, that all changed and from that point on, I've been a pretty enthusiastic eater of new and strange food. — Mary Roach

Other examples of human-sourced pharmaceuticals surely causing more distress than they relieved include strips of cadaver skin tied around the calves to prevent cramping, "old liquified placenta" to "quieten a patient whose hair stands up without cause" (I'm quoting Li Shih-chen on this one and the next), "clear liquid feces" for worms ("the smell will induce insects to crawl out of any of the body orifices and relieve irritation"), fresh blood injected into the face for eczema — Mary Roach

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

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

The traditional gross anatomy lab represented a sort of sink-or-swim mentality about dealing with death. To cope with what was being asked of them, medical students had to find ways to desensitize themselves. They quickly learned to objectify cadavers, to think of the dead as structures and tissues, and not a former human being. Humor--at the cadaver's expense--was tolerated, condoned even. — Mary Roach

On the way here, I stopped in the office of a block captain who wanted to tell me about an inmate who was caught with two boxes of staples, a pencil sharpener, sharpener blades, and three jumbo binder rings in his rectum. He became known as "OD," for Office Depot. They never found out what he intended to do with the stuff. — 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 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

I'm one of those goobers who comes out of the polling place actually wearing the 'I VOTED' sticker on my jacket. — Mary Roach

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

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

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

He'll always make time to talk to you if you call, but it becomes quickly clear in the course of the conversation that spare time is something Zugibe has very little of. He'll be halfway through an explanation of the formula used to determine the pull of the body on each of Christ's hands when his voice will wander away from the telephone for a minute and then he'll come back and say, Excuse me. A nine year old body. Father beat her to death. Where were we? — Mary Roach

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

The M16 has a scope with a small red arrow in the center of the sight. You align the arrow with what or (jeez) whom you wish to shoot and squeeze the trigger. Both "squeeze" and "pull" are exaggerations of the motion applied to this trigger. It's a trivial, tiny movement, the twitch of a dreaming child. So quick and so effortless is it that it's hard for me to associate it with any but the most inconsequential of acts. Flipping a page. Typing an M. Scratching an itch. Ending a life wants a little more muscle. — Mary Roach

He will be lowered into a vat of liquid nitrogen and frozen. From here he will progress to the second chamber, where either ultrasound waves or mechanical vibration will be used to break his easily shattered self* into small pieces, more or less the size of ground chuck. The pieces, still frozen, will then be freeze-dried and used as compost for a memorial tree or shrub, either in a churchyard memorial park or in the family's yard. — Mary Roach

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

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

I've had kids object to their dad's wishes (to donate)," says Ronn Wade, director of the Anatomical Services Division of the University of Maryland School of Medicine. "I tell them, 'Do what's best for you. You're the one who has to live with it. — Mary Roach

Flatulence peaks twice a day ... five hours after lunch and five hours after dinner. — Mary Roach

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

Wisdom comes with age, but keep it to yourself. — Mary Roach

Silletti and I, for instance, chewed out cotton wads for the same amount of time. I produced .78 milliliters of stimulated saliva; she produced 1.4. She tried to reassure me. "It doesn't say anything about how good you are or how good I am with saliva."
"Erika, I'm a dried up husk."
"Don't say that, Mary. — Mary Roach

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

If you don't have a pair of cadaver shoes, you're not doing enough research. — 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.' — Mary Roach

If I couldn't use food or love to define contentment, I would use reading. — Mary Roach

(As brain cells die from oxygen starvation, euphoria sets in, and one last, grand erection.) — Mary Roach

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

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

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

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

Though it's harder to justify the use of a cadaver for practicing nose jobs than it is for practicing coronary bypasses, it is justifiable nonetheless. Cosmetic surgery exists, for better or for worse, and it's important, for the sake of those who undergo it, that the surgeons who do it are able to do it well. — Mary Roach

A space station is a rangy monstrosity, a giant erector set built by a madman. — Mary Roach

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

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

Religion says that your soul goes to heaven or possibly to a seven-tiered garden, or that your soul is reincarnated into a new body, or that you lie around in your coffin clothes until the Second Coming. And, of course, only one of these can be true. Which means that for millions of people, religion will turn out to have been a bum steer as regards the hereafter. (13) — Mary Roach

Why don't suicide bombers smuggle bombs in their rectums? — Mary Roach

To me, death is dark, pain, grief. — Mary Roach

The human organism is built for tension and relaxation, work and sleep. The principle of life is rhythm. — Mary Roach

I believe that not everything we humans encounter in our lives can be neatly and convincingly tucked away inside the orderly cabinetry of science. — 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

I've been writing full-time since about 1984 - mostly magazine features and columns. — Mary Roach

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

For me, hands are hard." She looks up from what she's doing. "Because you're holding this disconnected hand, and it's holding you back." Cadavers occasionally effect a sort of accidental humanness that catches the medical professional off guard. I once spoke to an anatomy student who described a moment in the lab when she realized that the cadaver's arm was around her waist. It becomes difficult, under circumstances such as these, to retain one's clinical remove. — Mary Roach

They say that women's sexual peaks are in their 30s or 40s, and I think that it happens because they're more comfortable. It's not some hormonal change that happens at that age. Of course, it would be nice to have more physiological insight on that. — Mary Roach

Gravitation is the lust of the cosmos. — Mary Roach

If there were ever a cadaver eligible for sainthood, it would not be our Spalding Gray upon the cross, it would be these guys: the brain-dead, beating-heart organ donors that come and go in our hospitals every day. — Mary Roach

Many space psychology experiments these days focus on ways to detect stress or depression in a person who doesn't intend to tell you about it. — Mary Roach

The slang for the rectum is "prison wallet". — Mary Roach

In a wartime survey conducted by a team of food-habits researchers, only 14 percent of the students at a women's college said they liked evaporated milk. After serving it to the students sixteen times over the course of a month, the researchers asked again. Now 51 percent liked it. As Kurt Lewin put it, People like what they eat, rather than eat what they like. — Mary Roach

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

Is it possible to bolster one's hip bones by doing some type of controlled fall? Here — Mary Roach

You are a person and then you cease to be a person, and a cadaver takes your place. — Mary Roach

I find the dead easier to be around than the dying. They are not in pain, not afraid of death. There are no awkward silences and conversations that dance around the obvious. They aren't scary...Cadavers, once you get used to them--and you do that quite fast--are surprisingly easy to be around. — Mary Roach

it is the Mediterranean, specifically Italy, that gave us the poet Ovid, who in the Metamorphoses deplored the eating of animals, and the vegetarian Leonardo da Vinci, who envisioned a day when the life of an animal would be valued as highly as that of a person, and Saint Francis, who once petitioned the Holy Roman Emperor to scatter grain on fields on Christmas Day and give the crested larks a feast. — Mary Roach

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

People are surprisingly off put just by saliva, the substance that you carry around in your mouth. You swallow it. You have no objection to it. But then it leaves your body, and you're just revolted. So it - that - just that right there to me is a fascinating thing. — Mary Roach

Sipski defines orgasm as a reflex of the autonomic nervous system that can be either facilitated or inhibited by cerebral input (thoughts and feelings). — Mary Roach

Worry lives a long way from rational thought.
Self — Mary Roach

People are messy, unpredictable things. — Mary Roach

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

Pretty much any amino acid arrangement can be hydrolyzed, including those of the recyclable that dares not speak its name. A four-person crew will, over the course of three years, generate somewhere in the neighborhood of a thousand pounds of feces. In the ominous words of sixties space nutritionist Emil Mrak, "The possibility of reuse must be considered." Sometime — Mary Roach

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

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. — Mary Roach

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

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

Dissection and surgical instruction, like meat-eating, require a carefully maintained set of illusions and denial. Physicians and anatomy students must learn to think of cadavers as wholly unrelated to the people they once were. — Mary Roach

Dead people never seem to address the obvious - the things you'd think they'd be bursting to talk about, and the things all of us not-yet-dead are madly curious about. Such as: 'Hey, where are you now? What do you do all day? What's it feel like being dead? Can you see me? Even when I'm on the toilet? Would you cut that out?' — Mary Roach

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

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. — Mary Roach