I dont fear death so much as I fear its prologues: loneliness, decrepitude, pain, debilitation, depression, senility. After a few years of those, I i…

- Mary Roach

You are a person and then you cease to be a person, and a cadaver takes your place.

- Mary Roach

I walk up and down the rows. The heads look like rubber halloween masks. They also look like human heads, but my brain has no precedent for human hea…

- Mary Roach

The point is that no matter what you choose to do with your body when you die, it won't, ultimately, be very appealing. If you are inclined to donate…

- Mary Roach

In my experience, the most staunchly held views are based on ignorance or accepted dogma, not carefully considered accumulations of facts. The more y…

- Mary Roach

I began thinking about my skeleton, this solid, beautiful thing inside me that I would never see.

- Mary Roach

Here is the secret to surviving one of these [airplane] crashes: Be male. In a 1970 Civil Aeromedical institute study of three crashes involving emer…

- Mary Roach

The way I see it, being dead is not terribly far off from being on a cruise ship. Most of your time is spent lying on your back. The brain has shut d…

- Mary Roach

Many people will find this book disrespectful. There is nothing amusing about being dead, they will say. Ah, but there is.

- Mary Roach