Top 250 Mary Roach Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Sexual desire is a state not unlike hunger.”

— Mary Roach

2. “It is the mind that speaks a woman’s heart, not the vaginal walls.”

— Mary Roach

3. “The human liver is a boss-looking organ.”

— Mary Roach

4. “Wisdom comes with age, but keep it to yourself.”

— Mary Roach

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

— Mary Roach

6. “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

7. “In ‘Packing for Mars,’ I tried to convey the importance of getting young people interested in science.”

— Mary Roach

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

— Mary Roach

9. “Death. It doesn’t have to be boring.”

— Mary Roach

10. “Space doesn’t just encompass the sublime and the ridiculous. It erases the line between.”

— Mary Roach

11. “Hormones are nature’s three bottles of beer.”

— Mary Roach

12. “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

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

— Mary Roach

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

— Mary Roach

15. “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

16. “Hydrogen sulfide is so swiftly lethal that farm- and workplace-safety organizations urge anyone who enters a manure pit or attempts to clear a blocked sewage pipe to wear a self-contained breathing apparatus.”

— Mary Roach

17. “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.”

— Mary Roach

18. “Hydrogen sulfide is as lethal, molecule for molecule, as cyanide. This may explain why humans evolved such exquisite sensitivity to its smell.”

— Mary Roach

19. “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

20. “I would have sold my wife and children into slavery for a ride into space.”

— Mary Roach

21. “Hydromedusa tectifera are, like post-war Nazis, native to Argentina, Paraguay, and Brazil.”

— Mary Roach

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

— Mary Roach

23. “Upon the occasion of history’s first manned flight – in the 1780′s aboard the Montgolfier brothers’ hot-air balloons – someone asked Franklin what use he saw in such frivolity. “What use,” he replied, “is a newborn baby?”

— Mary Roach

24. “Gravity is why there are suns and planets in the first place. It is practically God. In the beginning, the cosmos was nothing but empty space and vast clouds of gases. Eventually the gases cooled to the point where tiny grains coalesced. These grains would have spent eternity moving through space, ignoring each other, had gravitational attraction not brought them together. Gravitation is the lust of the cosmos.”

— Mary Roach

25. “Science has the answer to every question that can be asked. However, science reserves the right to change that answer should additional data become available.”

— Mary Roach

26. “In “Working Ethics: William Beaumont, Alexis St. Martin, and Medical Research in Antebellum America,” historian Alexa Green explains the men’s relationship as clearly one of master and servant.” If the man wants to push a piece of mutton through your side, you let him.”

— Mary Roach

27. “Members of the 1860 Burke and Wills expedition to cross Australia fell prey to scurvy or starved in part because they refused to eat what the indigenous Australians ate. Bugong-moth abdomen and witchetty grub may sound revolting, but they have as much scurvy-battling vitamin C as the same size serving of cooked spinach, with the additional benefits of potassium, calcium, and zinc.”

— Mary Roach

28. “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

29. “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

30. “Medicare reimbursement code for maggots: CPT 99070.”

— Mary Roach

31. “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

32. “You are a person and then you cease to be a person, and a cadaver takes your place.”

— Mary Roach

33. “The Inuit, at the time I visited Igloolik, had no tradition of keeping animals as companions. A sled dog was more or less a piece of equipment. When I told Makabe Nartok that I had a cat, he asked, “What do you use it for?” In America, pets are family, never fare.”

— Mary Roach

34. “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

35. “Cheese crumbs spread in front of a copulating pair of rats may distract the female, but not the male.”

— Mary Roach

36. “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

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

— Mary Roach

38. “There wasn’t an anhydrous lacrimal gland in the room...”

— Mary Roach

39. “Funny thing happened on the way to the moon: not much,” wrote Apollo 17 astronaut Gene Cernan. “Should have brought some crossword puzzles.”

— Mary Roach

40. “You are perhaps wondering, as I did, why they don’t use crash test dummies. This is the other side of the equation. A dummy can tell you how much force a crash is unleashing on various dummy body parts, but without knowing how much of a blow a real body part can take, the information is useless.”

— Mary Roach

41. “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

42. “I guess I feel the same way about being a corpse. Why lie around on your back when you can do something interesting and new, something useful?”

— Mary Roach

43. “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

44. “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.”

— Mary Roach

45. “I am not, by trade or character, a spotlight operator. I’m the goober with a flashlight, stumbling into corners and crannies, not looking for anything specific but knowing when I’ve found it.”

— Mary Roach

46. “In reality, maybe 1 percent of an astronaut’s career takes place in space, and 1 percent of that is done in a pressure suit.”

— Mary Roach

47. “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

48. “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

49. “We are all nature, all made of the same basic materials, with the same basic needs. We are no different, on a very basic level, from the ducks and the mussels and last week’s coleslaw. Thus we should respect Nature, and when we die, we should give ourselves back to the earth.”

— Mary Roach

50. “Fully half of all transplant patients, I found out, develop postoperative psychological problems of some sort.”

— Mary Roach