Top 250 Mary Roach Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “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

102. “At an Italian deli counter, a whiff of butyric acid reads as parmesan cheese; elsewhere, vomit.”

— Mary Roach

103. “It’s like a cat trying to imagine the taste of sugar. Cats, unlike dogs and other omnivores, can’t taste sweetness.”

— Mary Roach

104. “The organism is driven toward nature’s singular goal – conception, the passing on of one’s genes – and anything that stands in the way is pushed into the background.”

— Mary Roach

105. “Natick Labs and precursor the Quartermaster Subsistence Research Laboratory have extended shelf lives to near immortality. They currently make a sandwich that keeps for three years.”

— Mary Roach

106. “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

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

— Mary Roach

108. “And finally, my gratitude to UM 006, H, Mr. Blank, Ben, the big guy in the sweatpants, and the owners of the forty heads. You are dead, but you’re not forgotten.”

— Mary Roach

109. “You do not dress to please yourself; you dress to please others.”

— Mary Roach

110. “The Johnson Space Center “potty cam,” as it is more casually known, is an astronaut training aid. It provides a vivid, arresting perspective on something you’ve had intimate contact with all your life but never really seen. Perhaps not unlike viewing one’s home planet from space for the first time. Positioning is critical because the opening to a Space Shuttle toilet is 4 inches across, as opposed to the 18-inch maw we are accustomed to on Earth.”

— Mary Roach

111. “According to more than one astronaut memoir, one of the most beautiful sights in space is that of a sun-illumined flurry of flash-frozen waste-water droplets. Space doesn’t just encompass the sublime and the ridiculous. It erases the line between.”

— Mary Roach

112. “As on Earth, weight-bearing exercise is the best way to hang on to your bone. In zero gravity, of course, you have to create your weight.”

— Mary Roach

113. “People come to me and say, ‘My wine stinks. What happened?’” Langstaff can read the stink. Off-flavors – or “defects,” in the professional’s parlance – are clues to what went wrong. An olive oil with a flavor of straw or hay suggests a problem with desiccated olives. A beer with a “hospital” smell is an indication that the brewer may have used chlorinated water, even just to rinse the equipment. The wine flavors “leather” and “horse sweat” are tells for the spoilage yeast Brettanomyces.”

— Mary Roach

114. “For the scientists, they’re kind of puzzled and pleased that somebody finds their work interesting. It makes it fun for me. I feel like I’ve sort of turned over a stone that hasn’t been turned over.”

— Mary Roach

115. “How about suicide rate. And what a shame to lose them after they’ve made it back. We keep them alive, but we don’t teach them how to live.”

— Mary Roach

116. “If it’s exceedingly nasty,” Reed told me, “they will actually drag their tongue on the bedding to try to get it off.” Clearly taste matters to them.”

— Mary Roach

117. “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.”

— Mary Roach

118. “You mean like a small silicone breast implant?” I wasn’t actually thinking that, but sure.”

— Mary Roach

119. “Penguins can shut down digestion by lowering the temperature inside their stomach to the point where the gastric juices are no longer active. The stomach becomes a kind of cooler to carry home the fish they’ve caught for their young. Penguins’ hunting grounds may be several days’ journey from the nest. Without this handy refrigerated mode, the swallowed fish would be completely digested by the time the adults get back – “like.”

— Mary Roach

120. “If you lower your head to within a foot or two of an infested corpse – and this I truly don’t recommend – you can hear them feeding. Arpad pinpoints the sound. “Rice Krispies.” Ron frowns. Ron used to like Rice Krispies.”

— Mary Roach

121. “Human saliva contains histatins, which speed wound closure independent of their antibacterial action.”

— Mary Roach

122. “This is why you don’t just stick bodies in the refrigerator before an open-casket funeral.”

— Mary Roach

123. “No one goes out to play anymore. Simulation is becoming reality.”

— Mary Roach

124. “Most of us pass our lives never once laying eyes on our 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? It is, of course, possible that I seem strange. You may be thinking, Wow, that Mary Roach has her head up her ass. To which I say: Only briefly, and with the utmost respect.”

— Mary Roach

125. “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

126. “The extent to which Americans project their own food qualms and biases onto their pets has lately veered off into the absurd. Some of AFB’s clients have begun marketing 100 percent vegetarian kibble for cats. The cat is what’s called a true carnivore; its natural diet contains no plants. Moeller tilts his head. A slight lift of the eyebrows. The look says, “Whatever the client wants.”

— Mary Roach

127. “This is a book about notable achievements made while dead.”

— Mary Roach

128. “Irritable bowel syndrome is a well-documented, little-publicized aftermath of diarrheal infections – especially severe or repeated bouts. If you talk to people who’ve recently been diagnosed with IBS, about a third of them will say that their symptoms began after a bad attack of food poisoning. Defense Department databases reveal a five-fold higher risk of IBS among men and women who suffered an acute diarrheal infection while deployed in the Middle East.”

— Mary Roach

129. “The human liver is a boss-looking organ. It’s glossy, aerodynamic, Olympian.”

— Mary Roach

130. “My bias is that it does exist. But I would never say that I know that. Until I prove it.”

— Mary Roach

131. “Vinegar, cola, citrus juice, wine, all are in the acid range of the pH scale: from around pH 2 to 3. Anything under pH 4 will dissolve calcium phosphate, a key component of tooth enamel. The process is called demineralization. Take a drink of anything acid, and if you are paying attention, you will notice a sudden warm slosh: parotid saliva arriving like the cavalry to bring the pH back up to the safe zone.”

— Mary Roach

132. “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.”

— Mary Roach

133. “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

134. “The other mode of defecation-associated sudden death is pulmonary embolism. The surge of blood when the person relaxes can dislodge a clot in a large blood vessel.”

— Mary Roach

135. “Julie Rousseau said that the researchers told her they find some of her explanations far-fetched and do not consider the case closed. It is interesting to come across people who feel that a ghost communicating via a spell-checker is less far-fetched than a software glitch.”

— Mary Roach

136. “I came across a NATO symposium on Human Performance Optimization that included a roundup of medical technologies that might be repurposed to optimize warfighters. In among the prosthetic limbs “to provide superhuman strength” and the infrared and ultraviolet vision–bestowing eye implants was this: corpus callosotomy to “allow unihemispheric sleep and continuous alertness.”

— Mary Roach

137. “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

138. “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

139. “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

140. “For two people so firmly distanced by class and employment structure, Beaumont and St. Martin inhabited a relationship that could be oddly, intensely intimate. “On applying the tongue to the mucous coat of the stomach, in its empty, unirritated state, no acid taste can be perceived.”

— Mary Roach

141. “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.”

— Mary Roach

142. “Not long ago, a whale biologist named Phillip Clapham sent me a photograph that illustrates the consequences of life without a doorman. Like most creatures that swallow their food whole, sperm whales have a limited-to-nonexistent sense of taste. The photo is a black-and-white still life of twenty-five objects recovered from sperm whale stomachs. It’s like Jonah set up housekeeping: a pitcher, a cup, a tube of toothpaste, a strainer, a wastebasket, a shoe, a decorative figurine.”

— Mary Roach

143. “It’s no coincidence that the man who contributed the most to the study of human anatomy, the Belgian Andreas Vesalius, was an avid proponent of do-it-yourself, get-your-fussy-Renaissance-shirt-dirty anatomical dissection.”

— Mary Roach

144. “Every now and then in life, a compliment is tucked so seamlessly into a insult that it’s impossible to know how to react.”

— Mary Roach

145. “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

146. “It’s not so important to know the difference between bitter and sour, skunky and yeasty, tarry and burnt. “Who cares. They’re both terrible. Ew. But if you’re a brewer, it’s extremely important.”

— Mary Roach

147. “Unlike filets and stewing meats, organs look like what they are: body parts. That’s another reason we resist them. “Organs,” says Rozin, “remind us of what we have in common with animals.” In the same way a corpse spawns thoughts of mortality, tongues and tripe send an unwelcome message: you too are an organism, a chewing, digesting sack of guts.”

— Mary Roach

148. “Humans have taste receptor cells in the gut, the voice box, the upper esophagus, but only the tongue’s receptors report to the brain.”

— Mary Roach

149. “Back in the 1980s when everyone looked a bit off, my friend Tim and his brothers had some publicity shots taken of their band. Eventually they sold the rights to a stock photo agency. Years later, one of the images turned up on a greeting card. The inside said, “Greetings from the Dork Club.”

— Mary Roach

150. “Another group tried putting a new type of protective boot onto the hind leg of a mule deer for testing. Given that deer lack toes and heels and people lack hooves, and that no country I know of employs mule deer in land mine clearance, it is hard – though mildly entertaining – to try to imagine what the value of such a study could have been.”

— Mary Roach