Mary Roach Quotes

17 Sourced Quotes

Instead, I quietly excused myself and went to the bar, to commune with spirits I know how to relate to.

Mary Roach
The simplest strategy for bouts of noxious flatus is to not care. Or perhaps to take advantage of a gastroenterologist I know: get a dog. (To blame.)

Mary Roach
I would have sold my wife and children into slavery for a ride into space.

Mary Roach
It would be especially comforting to believe that I have the answer to the question, What happens when we die? Does the light just go out and that's that-the million-year nap? Or will some part of my personality, my me-ness, persist? What will that feel like? What will I do all day? Is there a place to plug in my laptop?

Mary Roach
Space doesn't just encompass the sublime and the ridiculous. It erases the line between.

Mary Roach
The suffix 'naut' comes from the Greek and Latin words for ships and sailing. Astronaut suggests 'a sailor in space.' Chimponaut suggests 'a chimpanzee in sailor pants'.

Mary Roach
It's this mood, these sentiments - the excitement of exploration and the surprises and delights of travel to foreign locales - that I hope to inspire with this book.

Mary Roach
Gravity disappears again, and we rise up off the floor like spooks from a grave. It's like the Rapture in here every thirty seconds.

Mary Roach
In the words of the late Francis Crick...You, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.

Mary Roach
Many people will find this book disrespectful. There is nothing amusing about being dead, they will say. Ah, but there is.

Mary Roach
The way I see it, being dead is not terribly far off from being on a cruise ship. Most of your time is spent lying on your back. The brain has shut down. The flesh begins to soften. Nothing much new happens, and nothing is expected of you.

Mary Roach
In my experience, the most staunchly held views are based on ignorance or accepted dogma, not carefully considered accumulations of facts. The more you expose the intricacies and realtities of the situation, the less clear-cut things become.

Mary Roach
You are a person and then you cease to be a person, and a cadaver takes your place.

Mary Roach
Normally I object to strangers beaming force fields into my brain.

Mary Roach
All good research — whether for science or for a book — is a form of obsession.

Mary Roach
Yes, the money could be better spent on Earth. But would it? Since when has money saved by government redlining been spent on education and cancer research? It is always squandered. Let's squander some on Mars. Let's go out and play.

Mary Roach
The human head is of the same approximate size and weight as a roaster chicken. I have never before had occasion to make the comparison, for never before today have I seen a head in a roasting pan.

Mary Roach