Top 250 Mary Roach Quotes (2026 Update)
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151. “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

152. “Denis Burkitt, fueled a decade-long fiber craze. Americans were forcing down unprecedented amounts of bran muffins, oatmeal, and high-fiber breakfast cereals. Whorton cited a 1984 survey that found a third of Americans eating more fiber to stay healthy. You don’t hear so much about fiber these days.”

— Mary Roach

153. “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

154. “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

155. “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

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. “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

158. “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

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. “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

162. “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

163. “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

164. “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

165. “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

166. “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

167. “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

168. “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

169. “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

170. “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

171. “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

172. “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

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

— Mary Roach

174. “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

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

— Mary Roach

176. “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

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

— Mary Roach

178. “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

179. “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

180. “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

181. “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

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

— Mary Roach

183. “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

184. “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

185. “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

186. “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

187. “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

188. “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

189. “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

190. “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

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

— Mary Roach

192. “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

193. “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

194. “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

195. “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

196. “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

197. “There are people who would love to spend their last ten years, or five years, or whatever it is, on the surface of Mars.”

— Mary Roach

198. “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

199. “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

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

— Mary Roach