Quotes from Natalie Angier

Most keep their condition secret from all but a few close friends. Interestingly, many of them say the thing they regret most is not their inability to have children but the lack of menstruation, the event they see as a monthly voucher of femaleness.

I hope that I'm right in my interpretation of the organic grandmother, that mother hunger is a primal trait of womanness, and that my daughter's need for me may prove larger, more enduring, and more passionate than the child's need for meals, clothes, shelter, and applause.

You understand that photons representing all colors of the rainbow stream from the sun and strike the surface of the rose, but that, as a result of the molecular composition of pigments in the rose, it's the red photons that bounce off its petals and up to your eyes, and so you see red.

physicist Werner Heisenberg, whose famed uncertainty principle says that you can know the position of an electron as it orbits the nuclear heart of an atom, or you can know its velocity, but that you can't know both at once.

All baby clothes are adorable, whoever they're meant for (and in the end, of course, they're meant for the parents). All remind you of how vulnerable an infant is, how wholly incompetent and in need of adult largess. You don't look at blue clothes and think "strong" or pink clothes and think "fragile." You look at everything in these micromatized dimensions and think, "How precious! How ridiculous! What was evolution thinking of?

The physicist Eugene Wigner talked of "the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics"—in delineating the present, disinterring the past, and baking a trustier fortune cookie.

The authors present many things that are new, and many things that are true; unfortunately, the things that are true are not new; and the things that are new are not true.

Pitocin, the drug given to pregnant women to jump-start recalcitrant labor, is a synthetic version of oxytocin.

The uterus is a part of the endocrine system, the macramé of glands, organs, and brain structures that secrete and respond to hormones

A ewe usually is a good mother, but she will turn bad if for some reason she is separated from her lamb shortly after birth. Then she is likely to reject the lamb, refusing to nurse it. Sheep farmers have a way of persuading her otherwise. They stimulate her vagina with a kind of sheep dildo. The tickling releases a stream of oxytocin in her brain, and she then takes the lamb to udder. An oxytocin pump in her spinal cord will have the same maternogenic impact.

More often than not, the ideal breast is an invented breast. Decolletage, the tushy breast, is an artifact of clothing. Naked breasts don't dance cheek to cheek--they turn away from each other. Breasts vary in size and shape to an outlandish degree, but they can be whipped into an impressive conformity, and because we are human and we can't leave anything alone, we have whipped away.

mucus, a mixture of white blood cells, water, the sticky protein known as mucin, and cast-off tissue cells.

heavy bleeding in the premenopausal years is in fact normal.

A woman's breasts welcome illusion and the imaginative opportunities of clothing.

A meditative state can be attained through measured, rhythmic breathing.

estrogen spurs the growth of many cell types—mammal, insect, grain.

Experience, after all, is a trustworthier friend than intuition.

The body of the average woman is 27 percent fat, that of the average man 15 percent fat. The leanest elite female athletes may get their body fat down to 11 or 12 percent, but that is nearly double the percentage of body fat found on the elite male athlete

An internally conceived and gestated fetus is a protected fetus, and a protected fetus is a fetus freed to loll about long enough to bloom a giant brain. So we lend new meaning to the term egghead: from the cloistered egg is born the bulging frontal lobe.

If you are or have ever been a girl, you know that girls are aggressive. This is news the way the Code of Hammurabi is news. Yet the girls in station break Candyland are never aggressive; in fact, they are getting gooier by the year. Nor are the girls who prance through the meadows of biological theory ever aggressive. No, they're prosocial. They're verbal, interactive, attentive, amiable. They're the friends you wish you could buy along with the Belchee Baby you saw on TV.

As youth flowers into maturity, the barrier between nerd and herd grows taller and thicker and begins to sprout thorns.

High-density lipoprotein is not really cholesterol but a carrier of cholesterol, able to absorb cholesterol particles and other fats from the blood and donate them to tissues if needed, or to the liver for processing and excretion if not.

the body evolved to gather vegetables, not to become them, and who resists being absorbed entirely by the creamy perilife that is the desk-computer dyad, may decide, Feh, I'll forgo the pills, I'll take a walk, I'll lift a weight, I'll visit my daughter and offer to babysit her kids right now.

estrogen tells the liver habitually to favor the production of HDL over that of low-density lipoprotein. (Intense exercise can have a similarly promotional effect on the liver's outlay of HDL; the rigors of chronic activity inspire the same anabolic spirit that reproduction does, the same need to scavenge available blood lipids for the sake of creating new cells.)