quotes by 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 down. The flesh begins to soften. Nothing much new happens, and nothing is expected of you. "
— Mary Roach (Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers)

"The human head is of the same approximate size and weight as a roaster chicken. I have never before had occasion to make the comparison, for never before today have I seen a head in a roasting pan."
— Mary Roach (Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers)

"One IGHS member said that, yup, she could hear it, too. Then again, during a dinner conversation earlier in the trip, this same woman heard “Siegfried and Roy” as “Sigmund Freud.” The resulting image-Sigmund Freud with flowing hair and tigers and too much men’s makeup-haunts me to this day."
— Mary Roach

"there is a photograph of zugibe and one of his volunteers in the aforementioned sindon article. zugibe is dressed in a knee-length white lab coat and is shown adjusting one of the vital sign leads affixed to the man's chest. the cross reaches almost to the ceiling, towering over zugibe and his bank of medical monitors. the volunteer is naked except for a pair of gym shorts and a hearty mustache. he wears the unconcerned, mildly zoned-out expression of a person waiting at a bus stop. neither man appears to have been self-conscious about being photographed this way. i think that when you get yourself down deep into a project like this, you lose sight of how odd you must appear to the rest of the world."
— Mary Roach (Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers)

""Worry lives a long way from rational thought."---Self"
— Mary Roach