Mary Roach Quotes
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Every crazy fad from the 1800s comes back or they never go away. It's like fashion, like everything's already been invented, and somebody stumbles onto it and people will always, always be looking for an answer for some vague illness they can't get a diagnosis for.
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To me, death is dark, pain, grief.
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I get really excited about specific therapies, personalized therapies. Like, let's say, taking a piece of someone's tumor and testing a bunch of treatments in a lab and being able to come up with the right therapy for that specific patient.
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I have a nice little office, with a nice little window in it, but I do basically spend huge amounts of time in what you could consider solitary confinement.
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I've always been a bit of a space geek. I wrote an article years ago about the neutral buoyancy tank, which is this biblically sized pool where they train astronauts. And it was just the coolest thing.
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Dead people never seem to address the obvious - the things you'd think they'd be bursting to talk about, and the things all of us not-yet-dead are madly curious about. Such as: 'Hey, where are you now? What do you do all day? What's it feel like being dead? Can you see me? Even when I'm on the toilet? Would you cut that out?'
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Flatulence peaks twice a day... five hours after lunch and five hours after dinner.
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The Internet is a boon for hypochondriacs like me.
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When you buy my books, you kind of know what you're in for. It's kind of self-selecting. If you have a delicate sensibility, and you're easily grossed out, you probably will never read one of my books.
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Day by day, I'm kind of a bore.
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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?
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Science is you! It's your head, it's your dog, it's your iPhone - it's the world. How do you see that as boring? If it's boring, it's because you're learning it from a textbook.
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LOL is rarely OL, or even really L. A real out-loud laugh - not the forced social variety, which is closer to barking than laughing - is uncommon among adults.
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There are people who would love to spend their last ten years, or five years, or whatever it is, on the surface of Mars.
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When I'm done with a book, I always give it to someone with expertise in the topic and tell them to flag all of my stupid mistakes.
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To keep your he-man jaw muscles from smashing your precious teeth, the only set you have, the body evolved an automated braking system faster and more sophisticated than anything on a Lexus. The jaw knows its own strength. The faster and more recklessly you close your mouth, the less force the muscles are willing to apply.
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Chew on this: Human teeth can detect a grain of sand or grit 10 microns in diameter. A micron is 1/25,000 of an inch. If you shrank a Coke can until it was the diameter of a human hair, the letter O in the product name would be about 10 microns across.
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My books are not really books; they're endless chains of distraction shoved inside a cover. Many of them begin at the search box of Pub Med, an Internet database of medical journal articles.
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Though it's harder to justify the use of a cadaver for practicing nose jobs than it is for practicing coronary bypasses, it is justifiable nonetheless. Cosmetic surgery exists, for better or for worse, and it's important, for the sake of those who undergo it, that the surgeons who do it are able to do it well.
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Meteorite hunting is not for wimps. The best places to look are also the coldest and windiest. You need very old ice, and you need wind, lots of it, strong and unrelenting. Antarctica fits the bill.
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I could have had a session of defecography, which is a diagnostic test in which X-rays are taken to assess anatomical problems occurring during the process of defecation. I gave it the briefest of thoughts before recognizing that this is beyond the pale - even for me.
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My husband recently made me try on a bikini. A bikini is not so much a garment as a cloth-based reminder that your parts have been migrating all these years. My waist, I realized that day in the dressing room, has completely disappeared beneath my rib cage, which now rests directly on my hips. I'm exhibiting continental drift in reverse.
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I'm drawn to the taboos that surround the human body. I find it fascinating that we are repelled by many of the acts and processes that keep us alive.