Mary Roach Quotes
Every now and then, someone will tell me that one of my books has made them laugh out loud. I never believe them because: a.) my books don't make me laugh out loud; and b.) sometimes I have said this to a writer, when really what I meant was, 'Your book made me smile appreciatively.'

Quotes to Explore
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Comfort and luxury are usually the chief requirements of life for your ego - its top priorities tend to be accumulations, achievements, and the approval of others.
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Even complex passwords are getting easy to break if they're too short. That's because today's inexpensive computer chips have the power of supercomputers from the year 2000.
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Nearly every president in the past 100 years has declared national monuments, from Teddy Roosevelt creating the Grand Canyon National Monument to George W. Bush preserving 10 islands and 140,000 square miles of ocean waters in the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands.
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The African-American tradition, in the main, is very, very church-based, very, very Christian. It accepts, you know, certain narratives about the world. I didn't really have that present in my house.
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What we know for sure from our work and from others' is that mice have a life span of 1,000 days, dogs have 5,000 days, and we humans have 29,000 days. Recognizing that the duration is limited, and aging is inevitable, focus the attention on enhancing the quality of the days you have.
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I grew up in the '80s. I was a kid, but all my favorite movies came out of that period.
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One of the things I wonder is whether it's good that the whole free model makes a lot of people listen to more of your music. I'm wondering if it devalues it, it becomes disposable, because you can get it so easily.
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Anyone can call himself a promoter. Anyone can call himself a promoter and stage a fight. Unlike other professional sports, whose owners collude out of mutual interest in their sport's image and general welfare, there are no real alliances or partnerships in boxing.
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When a single author uploading his own books to Amazon can earn more money than a large N.Y. publisher exploiting both print and e-rights, there's something amiss.
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There's a certain kind of behavior in the Arab world that, to me, resembles the way young men behave when there is no significant influence from women in their lives.
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Advertising is the price companies pay for being unoriginal.
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I'm not completely at ease at rapping, I can't do it well yet.
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You ask any person in the U.S. and they know who Mary Lou Retton is.
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Every woman should shave her head once in her life, to experience what it feels like.
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I don't wanna sound pretentious talking about myself.
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Being an actress can be a little like being a girl in the '50s: You're stuck waiting by the phone, hoping that the boy you like will call.
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I thought it was a really good contrast to have a really sweet, sincere, church girl sitting next to the church lady who seemed kind of, you know, over the top.
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I don't think paper will go away. I do believe that the value of paper will change, and Xerox is working on changing that value. Consider a color page. Actual life is in color, but you keep reproducing it in black and white. You remove value. It's a bad thing to do.
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My parents are definitely my biggest role models.
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It's difficult to always perform well, to always go on the court and win and hit great shots. It takes a lot of time and a long learning process.
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If people are all the same underneath, how has society changed so fast and so radically? Life now is completely different to how it was 32,000 years ago. It's changed like that of no other species has. What's made that difference?
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We are excellent at launching Tomahawk missiles; we need to get better at launching ideas.
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Every now and then, someone will tell me that one of my books has made them laugh out loud. I never believe them because: a.) my books don't make me laugh out loud; and b.) sometimes I have said this to a writer, when really what I meant was, 'Your book made me smile appreciatively.'