Top 250 Mary Roach Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “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

152. “Your genes want you to get pregnant, and hormones are their magic wand.”

— Mary Roach

153. “She warns me about equating complexity with quality. “All that stuff you read on wine bottles, in wine magazines, where they throw out a dozen descriptors? That’s not sensory evaluation. That’s marketing.”

— Mary Roach

154. “If you look at survivable crashes, it’s rare that even half the emergency exits open,” says Shanahan. “Plus, there’s a lot of panic and confusion.” Shanahan cites the example of a Delta crash in Dallas. “It should have been very survivable. There were very few traumatic injuries. But a lot of people were killed by the fire. They found them stacked up at the emergency exits. Couldn’t get them open.”

— Mary Roach

155. “The bacteria species in your colon today are more or less the same ones you had when you were six months old. About 80 percent of a person’s gut microflora transmit from his or her mother during birth. “It’s a very stable system,” says Khoruts. “You can trace a person’s family tree by their flora.”

— Mary Roach

156. “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

157. “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

158. “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

159. “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

160. “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

161. “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

162. “Nature will castigate those who don’t masticate’ may hold some truth,” concluded the paper, which appeared in the October 1980 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine. On the whole-peanut diet, the subjects excreted 18 percent of the fat they’d consumed. When they switched to peanut butter, only 7 percent escaped in their stool.”

— Mary Roach

163. “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.”

— Mary Roach

164. “Dr. Grime carries a Tide stain pen. He does not use his own spit. Art conservators do. “We make cotton swabs on bamboo sticks and moisten the swab in our mouths,” says Andrea Chevalier, senior paintings conservator with the Intermuseum Conservation Association.”

— Mary Roach

165. “I tell Mark I’m glad to see some cup holders were left in place. I recognize the brief, polite silence that follows. It’s Mark Roman rendered mute by the fullness of my ignorance. They’re rifle holders.”

— Mary Roach

166. “You want a vivid description of what’s going through my brain as I’m cutting through a liver and all these larvae are spilling out all over me and juice pops out of the intestines?” I kind of did, but I kept quiet. He went on: “I don’t really focus on that. I try to focus on the value of the work. It takes the edge off the grotesqueness.”

— Mary Roach

167. “To Huang Ti’s credit, though, he managed, without ever disassembling a corpse, to figure out that “the blood of the body is under the control of the heart” and that “the blood current flows in a continuous circle and never stops.” In other words, the man figured out what William Harvey figured out, four thousand years before Harvey and without laying open any family members.”

— Mary Roach

168. “The pay worked out to about $1,000 a year – some five to ten times the earnings of the average unskilled laborer – with summers off. The job was immoral, and ugly to be sure, but probably less unpleasant than it sounds.”

— Mary Roach

169. “The flesh gives no resistance and yields no blood.”

— Mary Roach

170. “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

171. “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

172. “I’ve read plenty of amazing science pieces where the writers don’t hang out in labs. I just have fun doing it. And I get rewarded for it; I get gushy, especially when kids tell me they expected to be bored by my books, but weren’t.”

— Mary Roach

173. “Bacteria don’t have mouths or fingers or Wolf Ranges, but they eat.”

— Mary Roach

174. “The other way to train medics is to have them practice a skill so many times that it becomes automatic. So when the prefrontal cortex goes AWOL, when reasoning drops away, muscle memory, one hopes, will persist.”

— Mary Roach

175. “The body’s response to this wild, Valsalvic seesawing of the vital signs can throw off the electrical rhythm of the heart. The resulting arrhythmia can be fatal. This is especially likely to happen in someone, like Elvis, with a compromised heart. Fatal arrhythmia is the cause of death listed on Presley’s autopsy report.”

— Mary Roach

176. “If you insist on driving around in vintage cars with no seat belt on, try to time your crashes for the systole – blood-squeezed-out – portion of your heartbeat.”

— Mary Roach

177. “Edison believed that living beings were animated and controlled by “life units,” smaller-than-microscopic entities that inhabited each and every cell and, upon death, evacuated the premises, floated around awhile, and eventually reassembled to animate a new personality – possibly another man, possibly an ocelot or a sea cucumber.”

— Mary Roach

178. “Could those sound waves shake apart your organs? NASA did testing on this back in the sixties, to be sure, as one infrasound expert told me, “that they didn’t deliver jam to the moon.”

— Mary Roach

179. “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 human bodies, and so I think it has chosen to interpret the sight in a more comforting manner.”

— Mary Roach

180. “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

181. “To open people’s minds to a new food, you sometimes just have to get them to open their mouths. Research has shown that if people try something enough times, they’ll probably grow to like it.”

— Mary Roach

182. “They think of it as lubricating, and that’s it!” She went back to her hotel room and called her boyfriend in tears.”

— Mary Roach

183. “Animals’ taste systems are specialized for the niche they occupy in the environment. “That’s driven their sensory systems down a certain path,” Rawson says. This includes the animal known as us.”

— Mary Roach

184. “Nirlungayuk reached a similar conclusion. I tracked him down, seventeen years later, and asked him what the outcome of his country-foods campaign had been. “It didn’t really work,” he said, from his office in the Nunavut department of wildlife and environment. “Kids eat what parents make for them. That’s one thing I didn’t do is go to the parents.”

— Mary Roach

185. “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

186. “No man got an erection from looking at “brown string sandals.”

— Mary Roach

187. “Weightlessness is like heroin, or how I imagine heroin must be. You try it once, and when it’s over, all you can think about is how much you want to do it again. But apparently the thrill wears off.”

— Mary Roach

188. “Rawson has an idea of what it is like to eat without perceiving tastes, because she has talked to cancer patients whose taste receptors have been destroyed by radiation treatments. The situation is well beyond unpleasant. “Your body is saying, ‘It’s not food, it’s cardboard,’ and it won’t let you swallow. No matter how much you tell your brain that you need to eat to survive, you’ll gag. These people can actually die of starvation.”

— Mary Roach

189. “Frequent bowel movements were associated with an increased risk of rectal cancer in men, and constipation was associated with a decreased risk.” Mike Jones wasn’t surprised. The medical community was never completely on board Burkitt’s fiber train.”

— Mary Roach

190. “Three hundred feet down, seawater slams through a two-inch hole with enough force to bend a knee the way knees don’t bend.”

— Mary Roach

191. “Why don’t suicide bombers smuggle bombs in their rectums?”

— Mary Roach

192. “I think that at the moment of death that little window opens up. I think that maybe we’re all connected to something bigger than we are.”

— Mary Roach

193. “Space exploration is in some ways an exploration of what it means to be human. How much normalcy can people forgo? For how long, and what does it do to them?”

— Mary Roach

194. “It takes a certain kind of mind to interpret smidgens of fecal matter found in underwear as an ectoplasmic calling card rather than an ordinary by-product of a minor lapse in hygiene. It takes, I would think, a mildly psychotic kind of mind. Crawford’s.”

— Mary Roach

195. “This book is a tribute to the men and women who dared. Who, to this day, endure ignorance, closed minds, righteousness, and prudery. Their lives are not easy. But their cocktail parties are the best. p.”

— Mary Roach

196. “You may be wondering, though probably not, why newborns – who have no teeth to protect – produce excessive volumes of drool. Silletti has answers. One is simple mechanics. “They lack teeth to physically keep it in there.”

— Mary Roach

197. “Does everything have a father? Apparently so. A web search on “the father of” turned up fathers for vasectomy reversal, hillbilly jazz, lichenology, snowmobiling, modern librarianship, Japanese whiskey, hypnosis, Pakistan, natural hair care products, the lobotomy, women’s boxing, Modern Option Pricing Theory, the swamp buggy, Pennsylvania ornithology, Wisconsin bluegrass, tornado research, Fen-Phen, modern dairying, Canada’s permissive society, black power, and the yellow schoolbus.”

— Mary Roach

198. “By the time children are ten years old, generally speaking, they’ve learned to eat like the people around them. Once food prejudices are set, it is no simple task to dissolve them. In a separate study, Rozin presented sixty-eight American college students with a grasshopper snack, this time a commercially prepared honey-covered variety sold in Japan. Only 12 percent were willing to try one. So.”

— Mary Roach

199. “What sets a professional nose apart from an everyday nose is not so much its sensitivity to the many aromas in a food or drink, but the ability to tease them apart and identify them.”

— Mary Roach

200. “The public filed past Elmer in his casket, looking every bit the soldier and nothing at all the decomposing body.”

— Mary Roach