Quotes About Curiosity

One of the things I love about manned space exploration is that it forces people to unlace certain notions of what is and isn't acceptable. And possible. It's amazing what sometimes gets accomplished via an initially jarring but ultimately harmless shift in thinking.

One French clergyman recommended thrusting a red-hot poker up what Bondeson genteelly refers to as "the rear passage." A French physician invented a set of nipple pincers specifically for the purpose of reanimation. Another invented a bagpipelike contraption for administering tobacco enemas, which he demonstrated enthusiastically on cadavers in the morgues of Paris.

Funny thing happened on the way to the moon: not much," wrote Apollo 17 astronaut Gene Cernan. "Should have brought some crossword puzzles.

Death. It doesn't have to be boring.

Death doesn't have to be boring.

Space exploration is in some ways an exploration of what it means to be human. How much normalcy can people forgo? For how long, and what does it do to them?

I am not, by trade or character, a spotlight operator. I'm the goober with a flashlight, stumbling into corners and crannies, not looking for anything specific but knowing when I've found it. Courage

I remember watching Morin walk away from me, the endearing gait and the butt that got lubed for science, and thinking, "Oh my god, they're just people." NASA

How is it that we find Christina Aguilera more interesting than the inside of our own bodies? It is, of course, possible that I seem strange. You may be thinking, Wow, that Mary Roach has her head up her ass. To which I say: Only briefly, and with the utmost respect.

Time to try the palatant. I raise the cup to my nose. It has no smell. I roll some over my tongue. All five kinds of taste receptors stand idle. It tastes like water spiked with strange. Not bad, just other. Not food.

It's like a cat trying to imagine the taste of sugar. Cats, unlike dogs and other omnivores, can't taste sweetness.

The caption uses the scientific term for lip-licking: "lateral tongue protrusion.")

Most of us pass our lives never once laying eyes on our 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? It is, of course, possible that I seem strange. You may be thinking, Wow, that Mary Roach has her head up her ass. To which I say: Only briefly, and with the utmost respect.

In retrospect, it was silly to think that the experience of traveling in space could be approximated by a repurposed walk-in freezer. To find out what would happen to a man alone in the cosmos, at some point you just had to lob one up there.

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

Body snatching and other sordid tales from the dawn of human dissection

Alas, for me, a belief is not something you are born into or that you simply choose to adopt one day. Belief, for me, calls for plausibility. And so I continue my wanderings.

I don't want you to say, 'This is gross.' I want you to say, 'I thought this would be gross, but it's really interesting!' Okay, and maybe a little gross.

As one former anatomy instructor said to me, "No one's taking heads home in buckets anymore.

You may be wondering: Could Ella Fitzgerald explode your liver? She could not.

Jan Bondeson collected dozens of them for his witty and admirably researched book Buried Alive.

People were swallowing decayed human cadaver for the treatment of bruises. Seventeenth-century druggist Johann Becher, quoted in Wootton, maintained that it was "very beneficial in flatulency" (which, if he meant as a causative agent, I do not doubt).

What I still can't hear, after all these years, is the specific tip of the hat Steve hid in a countermelody in the title song: "Hank and Mary get into town tomorrow.

Learn from me, if not by my precepts, at least by my example, how dangerous is the acquirement of knowledge, and how much happier that man is who believes his native town to be his world, than he who aspires to become greater than his nature will allow.