Explore Quotes by Mary Roach

When I was 16, I had a job on the cleaning crew at a local hospital. I wore a pink uniform and cleaned bathrooms and buffed the hallway linoleum. Oddly, I don't recall hating the job. I recall getting choked up at the end of the summer when I went to turn in my uniform and say goodbye to the ladies.

I write with a sense of my future readers being ever on the verge of setting down the book and pronouncing it a bore. Fear and insecurity are great motivators.

It seems odd to think of tasting without any perceptive experience, but you are doing it right now. Humans have taste receptor cells in the gut, the voice box, the upper esophagus. But only the tongue's receptors report to the brain.

I didn't really realize that writing... would be fun and people would pay you to do it. Being an astronaut is a glory profession, and so is writing, in a way.

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?

There are fast chewers and slow chewers, long chewers and short chewers, right-chewing people and left-chewing people. Some of us chew straight up and down, and others chew side-to-side, like cows. Your oral processing habits are a physiological fingerprint.

Flatulence peaks twice a day... five hours after lunch and five hours after dinner.

I think by and large, humans prefer to think of themselves as minds from the neck up. We don't really like to think of ourselves as another animal, another digesting, excreting, mating, snoring, sleeping kind of sack of guts. I don't think we like that. I think we'd rather not be reminded of it.

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 rarely listen to music while writing. I wish I could, but it distracts me.

Dead people never seem to address the obvious - the things you'd think they'd be bursting to talk about, and the things all of us not-yet-dead are madly curious about. Such as: 'Hey, where are you now? What do you do all day? What's it feel like being dead? Can you see me? Even when I'm on the toilet? Would you cut that out?'

Meteorite hunting is not for wimps. The best places to look are also the coldest and windiest. You need very old ice, and you need wind, lots of it, strong and unrelenting. Antarctica fits the bill.

Spacewalking is a little like rock climbing in that everything, including and especially oneself, must be tethered or docked at all times. If you forget to tether a tool, it's gone. Ditto yourself.

Pet foods come in a variety of flavors because that's what humans like, and we assume our pets like what we like. We're wrong.

A space station is a rangy monstrosity, a giant erector set built by a madman.

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.

Mushy food is a form of sensory deprivation. In the same way that a dark, silent room will eventually drive you to hallucinate, the mind rebels against bland, single-texture foods, edibles that do not engage the oral device.

I don't read good books anymore, it seems; I just buy them and put them on the shelf and every now and then walk over and pet them. I'm like the optimistic dieter who fills her closet with clothes two sizes too small and dreams of the day she can wear them. I know just what I want to do when I retire.

Every now and then, someone will tell me that one of my books has made them laugh out loud. I never believe them because: a.) my books don't make me laugh out loud; and b.) sometimes I have said this to a writer, when really what I meant was, 'Your book made me smile appreciatively.'

Weightlessness was unbelievable. It's physical euphoria: Nothing about you has any weight. You don't realize that you are weighed down all the time by yourself, and your organs, and your head. Your arms weigh down your shoulders. In space simulation, you get to fly like Superman! You're hanging in the air! It's the coolest thing.

I've been writing full-time since about 1984 - mostly magazine features and columns.