Top 250 Mary Roach Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “NASA might do well to adopt the Red Bull approach to branding and astronautics. Suddenly the man in the spacesuit is not an underpaid civil servant; he’s the ultimate extreme athlete. Red Bull knows how to make space hip.”

— Mary Roach

52. “A bright light at the end of a tunnel can seem warm and inviting, or it can seem mysterious and terrifying. People of the world “all working on their arts and crafts” can seem like heaven or, if you’re me, hell.”

— Mary Roach

53. “Taste – as in personal preference, discernment – is subjective. It’s ephemeral, shaped by trends and fads. It’s one part mouth and nose, two parts ego. Even flavors that professional evaluators agree are “defects” can come to signify superior taste.”

— Mary Roach

54. “Time to try the palatant. I raise the cup to my nose. It has no smell. I roll some over my tongue. All five kinds of taste receptors stand idle. It tastes like water spiked with strange. Not bad, just other. Not food.”

— Mary Roach

55. “So animated are these freestanding hearts that surgeons have been known to drop them. “We wash them off and they do just fine,” replied New York heart transplant surgeon Mehmet Oz when I asked him about it. I imagined the heart slipping across the linoleum, the looks exchanged, the rush to retrieve it and clean it off, like a bratwurst that’s rolled off the plate in a restaurant kitchen.”

— Mary Roach

56. “We abide the surgeon’s scalpel to save our own lives, our 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

57. “Double sentencing wasn’t a new idea, but rather the latest variation on the theme. Before that, a murderer might be hanged and then drawn and quartered, wherein horses were tied to his limbs and spurred off in four directions, the resultant “quarters” being impaled on spikes and publicly displayed, as a colorful reminder to the citizenry of the ill-advisedness of crime.”

— Mary Roach

58. “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

59. “Olive trees grow in the same climate and soil conditions as grapes. The olive oil people have been up in Napa Valley all along, going, “Hey, how do we get a piece of this action?”

— Mary Roach

60. “Every mode of travel has its signature mental aberration.”

— Mary Roach

61. “The feminist in me, who is small and sleeps a lot but can be scrappy when provoked, took umbrage at this description.”

— Mary Roach

62. “Ability to Function Despite Imminent Catastrophe.”

— Mary Roach

63. “If you try this yourself, I recommend doing so when no one is home. Otherwise, you will run the risk of someone walking in on you and having to witness a scene that includes a mirror, the husband’s Stanley Powerlock tape measure, and the half-undressed self, squatting.”

— Mary Roach

64. “To understand the cautious respect for the dead that pervades the modern anatomy lab, it helps to understand the extreme lack of it that pervades the field’s history. Few sciences are as rooted in shame, infamy, and bad PR as human anatomy.”

— Mary Roach

65. “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

66. “Aspirin and ibuprofen combat inflammation everywhere but the stomach and bowel; there they create inflammation.”

— Mary Roach

67. “On top of its other charms, the maggot breathes through its ass. It.”

— Mary Roach

68. “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

69. “If you’re dying of thirst in the desert, drinking your urine won’t help you. The proteins and salts are by that point so concentrated that the body needs to pull fluid from the tissues to dilute them, which puts you back where you began, only worse, because now you are saddled with the memory of drinking your own murky, stinking pee. Rhabdomyolysis.”

— Mary Roach

70. “On the Iron Chef episode “Battle Offal,” judges swooned over raw heart tartar, lamb’s liver truffles, tripe, sweetbreads, and gizzard.”

— Mary Roach

71. “Analogies drawn from the inspection of hen’s eggs foundered on the objection that man was not a chicken.”

— Mary Roach

72. “You will hear no a lot. It’s about not giving up and having the absurd belief that someone, somewhere will say yes. I don’t go away easily.”

— Mary Roach

73. “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

74. “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

75. “To quantify the “benefit” side of the equation, a dollar amount is assigned to each saved human life. As calculated by the Urban Institute in 1991, you are worth $2.7 million.”

— Mary Roach

76. “One’s own dead are more than cadavers, they are place holders for the living. They are a focus, a receptacle, for emotions that no longer have one.”

— Mary Roach

77. “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

78. “The human organism is built for tension and relaxation, work and sleep. The principle of life is rhythm.”

— Mary Roach

79. “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

80. “Kinsey wanted Dellenback to film his own staff. There are three ways to read that sentence, all of them true.”

— Mary Roach

81. “What’s different? Sweat, risk, uncertainty, inconvenience. But also, awe. Pride. Something ineffably splendid and stirring.”

— Mary Roach

82. “You don’t need proof. You just need an inclination.”

— Mary Roach

83. “One French clergyman recommended thrusting a red-hot poker up what Bondeson genteelly refers to as “the rear passage.” A French physician invented a set of nipple pincers specifically for the purpose of reanimation. Another invented a bagpipelike contraption for administering tobacco enemas, which he demonstrated enthusiastically on cadavers in the morgues of Paris.”

— Mary Roach

84. “Most of them students from the nearby University of Dayton...”

— Mary Roach

85. “Yes, men and women eat meals. But they also ingest nutrients. They grind and sculpt them into a moistened bolus that is delivered, via a stadium wave of sequential contractions, into a self-kneading sack of hydrochloric acid and then dumped into a tubular leach field, where it is converted into the most powerful taboo in human history. Lunch is an opening act.”

— Mary Roach

86. “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

87. “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

88. “People who claim lactose intolerance tend to also voice a belief that they’re gluten-intolerant. Usually with no evidence of either.”

— Mary Roach

89. “To be fair, no eyewitness account or papyrus diary entries survive, and one wonders whether professional jealousy played a role. After all, no one was calling Tertullian the Father of Anatomy.”

— Mary Roach

90. “The early anatomists were dealing with a chronic shortage of bodies for dissection, and consequently were motivated to come up with ways to preserve the ones they managed to obtain. Blanchard’s textbook was the first to cover arterial embalming. He describes opening up an artery, flushing the blood out with water, and pumping in alcohol. I’ve been to frat parties like that.”

— Mary Roach

91. “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

92. “There is one thing dead people excel at. They’re.”

— Mary Roach

93. “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

94. “Gravity is why there are suns and planets in the first place. It is practically God.”

— Mary Roach

95. “Pus can be distinguished from mucus, wrote Dr. Samuel Cooper in his 1823 Dictionary of Practical Surgery, by its “sweetish mawkish” taste and a “smell peculiar to itself.” To the doctor who is still struggling with the distinction, perhaps because he has endeavored to learn surgery from a dictionary, Cooper offers this: “Pus sinks in water; mucus floats.”

— Mary Roach

96. “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

97. “Sometimes courage is nothing more than a willingness to think differently than those around you. In a.”

— Mary Roach

98. “Who’s going to open the gates of heaven to some slob with his entrails all hanging out and dripping on the carpeting? From the sixteenth century up until the passage of the Anatomy Act, in 1836, the only cadavers legally available for dissection in Britain were those of executed murderers. For this reason, anatomists came to occupy the same terrain, in the public’s mind, as executioners. Worse, even, for dissection was thought of, literally, as a punishment worse than death.”

— Mary Roach

99. “This book is a salute to the scientists and the surgeons, running along in the wake of combat, lab coats flapping. Building safer tanks, waging war on filth flies. Understanding turkey vultures. T.”

— Mary Roach

100. “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