Mary Roach Quotes

I have not eaten a lot of insects. I ate a termite in Africa, but it was on a bet. It was a soldier termite. It was alive, and I don't really recommend the live soldier termite as something you want to start with if you're going to start exploring eating insects.

Mary Roach

• Live
• Soldier

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Quotes to Explore

• We exist in this weirdly schizo culture, where sex is everywhere in the media, and yet, at the same time, you don't sit down and have a conversation about what you did in bed last night with your friends. Despite the ubiquity of sex, it's still a taboo when it comes to day-to-day conversation.

  

  Mary Roach
  • Time
  • Friends
  • Night

• One of the maddening ironies of writing books is that it leaves so little time for reading others'. My bedside is piled with books, but it's duty reading: books for book research, books for review. The ones I pine for are off on a shelf downstairs.

  

  Mary Roach
  • Time
  • Writing
  • Book

• I believe that not everything we humans encounter in our lives can be neatly and convincingly tucked away inside the orderly cabinetry of science.

  

  Mary Roach
  • Believe
  • Science

• Saliva has antibacterial properties. It also has things called nerve growth factor, skin growth factor, histatins which help with wound closure. So when you see an animal licking a wound or even a mom kissing a child's boo-boo, there's some, there's some good science behind why one might do this.

  

  Mary Roach
  • Good
  • Why
  • Help

• I don't fear death so much as I fear its prologues: loneliness, decrepitude, pain, debilitation, depression, senility. After a few years of those, I imagine death presents like a holiday at the beach.

  

  Mary Roach
  • Death
  • Fear
  • Pain

• 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.'

  

  Mary Roach
  • Believe
  • Book
  • Smile

• Mushy food is a form of sensory deprivation. In the same way that a dark, silent room will eventually drive you to hallucinate, the mind rebels against bland, single-texture foods, edibles that do not engage the oral device.

  

  Mary Roach
  • Mind
  • Food
  • Single

• I talk to a lot of people who, when you try to sum them up in a couple of sentences, seem like they must be insane.

  

  Mary Roach
  • People
  • Up
  • Couple

• I write with a sense of my future readers being ever on the verge of setting down the book and pronouncing it a bore. Fear and insecurity are great motivators.

  

  Mary Roach
  • Great
  • Book
  • Future

• For the most part, if somebody approaches me and says, 'I'd like to interview you,' who am I to say no, when I spend all my days going, 'Hello, you don't know me. I'd like to ask you some questions. Do you have a little time?'

  

  Mary Roach
  • Time

• Weightlessness was unbelievable. It's physical euphoria: Nothing about you has any weight. You don't realize that you are weighed down all the time by yourself, and your organs, and your head. Your arms weigh down your shoulders. In space simulation, you get to fly like Superman! You're hanging in the air! It's the coolest thing.

  

  Mary Roach
  • Time
  • Space
  • Air

• Fletcherizing is gross. I tried it once. I tried to go until it's all liquid, and it just creeps you out to be focusing so much on your chewing.

  

  Mary Roach

• Literally thousands of e-mails over the course of a book go out to people I've never met, people who might end up being the focus of a chapter.

  

  Mary Roach
  • People
  • Up
  • Book

• In terms of sustainability and what we eat and what its footprint is on the environment and the consequences of eating one thing versus another, obviously it makes a lot of sense to be eating insects. They're incredibly plentiful. They've got a very short turnover rate. You could be eating termites.

  

  Mary Roach
  • Environment

• 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
  • Money
  • Space

• Editors are more concerned with the first chapters of a book; that's what everyone reads first in the bookstore or in the online sample.

  

  Mary Roach
  • Book

• Eighty percent of flavor comes from your nose, including a set of internal nostrils. When you chew food and hold it in your mouth, the gases that are released goes into these nostrils. People who wolf their food are missing some of the flavor.

  

  Mary Roach
  • People
  • Food
  • Missing

• Most of the people who are engaged in the subjects that I look into are pretty interesting. Whether its sex researchers or someone who's devoted their career to saliva or somebody who does research with cadavers, there's an inherent fascination in the subject matter of their work.

  

  Mary Roach
  • People
  • Work
  • Pretty

• 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
  • Kids
  • Fun
  • Science

• A fine book, in the perfect setting, when there's all the time in the world to read it: Life holds greater joys, but none come to mind just now.

  

  Mary Roach
  • Life
  • Time
  • World

• Follow your instincts. Do the kind of writing you love to do and do best. 'Stiff' was an oddball book - I mean, a funny book about cadavers? - and I worried that it would be too unconventional. In the end, that's what has made it a success, I think.

  

  Mary Roach
  • Writing
  • Book
  • Success

• They say that women's sexual peaks are in their 30s or 40s, and I think that it happens because they're more comfortable. It's not some hormonal change that happens at that age. Of course, it would be nice to have more physiological insight on that.

  

  Mary Roach
  • Women
  • Age
  • Nice

• Astronauts are like these mythic legends, but really, they are just regular people, people who wear chinos.

  

  Mary Roach
  • People

• Bodily fluids and solids are universally the most disgusting things we as human beings can come upon, but as long as they are inside us, it's part of you.

  

  Mary Roach
  • Long