Quotes from Natalie Angier

I'm less opposed to pink than I am to dresses, for the simple reason that I hated dresses and skirts as a child. I hated the way they impeded my mobility and playground power, and I hated the fear I had while wearing them that with one stiff breeze I would be exposed to the world, with no choice afterward but to slip quietly into a permanent vegetative state.

If your doctor has no experience with hysteroscopic myomectomies, find one who does; the procedure is the best first-line attack against symptomatic fibroids.

Open the ovoid mother and find the ovoid girl; open the child and the next egg grins up its invitation to crack it. You can never tell a priori how many iterations await you; you hope they continue forever. My daughter, my matryoshka.

the great statistician Frederick Mosteller had a point when he said, "It is easy to lie with statistics, but it is easier to lie without them." Nevertheless, there are some steps you can take to, as Huff put it, "talk back to a statistic." Among the biggies recommended by many scientists is to ask a simple question: Does the figure, finding, or correlation make sense, that is, accord with what you know of objective reality?

It is about attacking a problem with the most manicured of claws and tearing it down into sensible, edible pieces.

not a body of facts, it is a way of thinking.

We are all yeses. We are worthy enough, we passed inspection, we survived the great fetal oocyte extinctions. In that sense, at least—call it a mechanospiritual sense—we are meant to be. We are good eggs, every one of us.

the pinkish peritoneum, the springy membrane that encloses and protects other organs.

I don't want to make too much of androstenedione, though. Testosterone isn't the only hormone that's overrated. All hormones are ultimately overrated, as well as poorly understood. But even though we know this mantra, we still get shackled by testosterone and need a new perspective to shake ourselves free.