Quotes About 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.

Follow your instincts. Do the kind of writing you love to do and do best. 'Stiff' was an oddball book - I mean, a funny book about cadavers? - and I worried that it would be too unconventional. In the end, that's what has made it a success, I think.

I like the term decedent. It's as though the man weren't dead but merely involved in some sort of protracted legal dispute.

It takes a certain kind of mind to interpret smidgens of fecal matter found in underwear as an ectoplasmic calling card rather than an ordinary by-product of a minor lapse in hygiene. It takes, I would think, a mildly psychotic kind of mind. Crawford's

The feminist in me, who is small and sleeps a lot but can be scrappy when provoked, took umbrage at this description.

it is indeed possible for humans to copulate in weightlessness. However, they have trouble staying together. The covert researchers discovered that it helped to have a third person to push at the right time in the right place. The anonymous researchers…discovered that this is the way dolphins do it. A third dolphin is always present during the mating process. This led to the creation of the space-going equivalent of aviation's Mile High Club known as the Three Dolphin Club. Stine

Here is what William Beaumont had to say about saliva: "Its legitimate and only use, in my opinion, is to lubricate the food to facilitate the passage of the bolus through the [esophagus]." Beaumont was right about some things, but he was dead wrong about spit.

People pooh-pooh Bud. It's an extremely well-made beer. It's clean, it's refreshing. If you're mowing the lawn and you come in and you want something refreshing and thirst-quenching, you wouldn't drink this." She indicates the IPA. Of all the descriptors

People who claim lactose intolerance tend to also voice a belief that they're gluten-intolerant. Usually with no evidence of either.

short piece headlined "Elvis Died of Constipation" had run as the site's lead story (and its middle and last story) under the category Constipation News. Why didn't the colonic inertia theory come up earlier? Nichopoulos says that at the time, he had never heard of it. Nor had the gastroenterologist who treated Presley in the 1970s. "Nobody knew about it back then," Nichopoulos says.

comparing traditional bouillon with gelatin-based broth. The latter was "more distasteful, more putrescible, less digestible, less nutritious, and . . . moreover, it often brought on diarrhea.

The public filed past Elmer in his casket, looking every bit the soldier and nothing at all the decomposing body.

He's the winningest guy I know, and I mean that from the bottom of my heart, which is the part that comes before the top.

If other fallers read this, he will no doubt get grief about his lovely hands, but I believe a man named Dazy will handle it.

When I get back to my room to review my notes, I find that I've written nothing of substance. I wasn't so much taking notes as testing my Fisher Space Pen. My notes say: "WOO" and "yippee.")

Sleeter Bull,* the author of the 1951 book Meat for the Table, claims the ancient Greeks had a taste for udders. Very specifically, "the udders of a sow just after she had farrowed but before she had suckled her pigs." That is either the cruelest culinary practice in history or so much Sleeter bull.

Could those sound waves shake apart your organs? NASA did testing on this back in the sixties, to be sure, as one infrasound expert told me, "that they didn't deliver jam to the moon." Bolte's

If you can trigger the Lazarus reflex in a dead person, why not the orgasm reflex?