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Free Literature Study Guides
The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

Free Literature Study Guides
The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

Mary Roach Quotes

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.

– Mary Roach

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

I’m always imposing my taste in books on others. I hope that people enjoy being surprised by a book they might not otherwise read – I enjoy the surprise myself when others do this to me.

– Mary Roach

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

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.

– Mary Roach

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

People are surprisingly off put just by saliva, the substance that you carry around in your mouth. You swallow it. You have no objection to it. But then it leaves your body, and you’re just revolted. So it – that – just that right there to me is a fascinating thing.

– Mary Roach

People don’t appreciate their intestines until something goes wrong. But I always hope that people gain a little appreciation for their guts.

– Mary Roach

I’m not a quick wit. I’m only funny on paper. I mean, I’m not totally humorless! It’s just that in person, I’m not quite the way I am on paper.

– Mary Roach

Most of us pass our lives never once laying eyes on our own organs, the most precious and amazing things we own. Until something goes wrong, we barely give them thought. This seems strange to me. How is it that we find Christina Aguilera more interesting than the inside of our own bodies?

– Mary Roach

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.

– Mary Roach

I’m one of those goobers who comes out of the polling place actually wearing the ‘I VOTED’ sticker on my jacket.

– Mary Roach

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

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

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.

– Mary Roach

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

The Internet is a boon for hypochondriacs like me.

– Mary Roach

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

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.

– Mary Roach

Animals’ taste systems are specialized for the niche they occupy in the environment. That includes us. As hunters and foragers of the dry savannah, our earliest forebears evolved a taste for important but scarce nutrients: salt and high-energy fats and sugars. That, in a nutshell, explains the widespread popularity of junk food.

– Mary Roach

To me, NASA is kind of the magical kingdom. I was sort of a geek, and you go there, and there are just these wondrously strange things and people.

– Mary Roach

Will I switch to E-reading? I won’t, mainly because I love the look and feel of books – particularly hardbacks. I love them enough to put up with the minor hassles of lugging them around and maneuvering them in my lap and having to set them aside while I eat my cheeseburger.

– Mary Roach

Because there are now online databases of federally funded research, and these databases are searchable by keyword, sex researchers have to be careful how they title their projects. It’s become a simple matter, for those who are so inclined, to find and target researchers whose work they object to on religious grounds.

– Mary Roach

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.

– Mary Roach

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

I love words, but I also love finding out that there is a word for something that you’ve experienced but didn’t know there was a word for. Like ‘toothpack’ – that is a word for when you eat biscuits or cookies and you get that annoying layer of chewed substance on your molars that you kind of have to pick out.

– 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

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.

– Mary Roach

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.

– Mary Roach

Any time you can take a book a little beyond the realm of pure entertainment, I think it’s a good thing. But I don’t really have it on my to-do list when I write a book. It just evolves naturally during the process of immersing yourself in a subject.

– Mary Roach

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