"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)

"The paper does not provide the exact number of penises eaten by ducks, but the author says there have been enough over the years to prompt the coining of a popular saying: 'I better get home or the ducks will have something to eat.'"
— Mary Roach (Bonk)

"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

"Footnote: In 1998, a woman in Saline, Michigan received a patent for a Decorative Penile Wrap...The patent included three pages of drawings, including a penis wearing a ghost outfit, another in the robes of the Grim Reaper, and one dressed up to look like a snowman. "
— Mary Roach

"It is astounding to me, and achingly sad, that with eighty thousand people on the waiting list for donated hearts and livers and kidneys, with sixteen a day dying there on that list, that more then half of the people in the position H's family was in will say no, will choose to burn those organs or let them rot. We abide the surgeon's scalpel to save our own lives, out loved ones' lives, but not to save a stranger's life. H has no heart, but heartless is the last thing you'd call her."
— Mary Roach (Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers)

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

"Death. It doesn't have to be boring."
— Mary Roach (Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers)

"Life contains these things: leakage and wickage and discharge, pus and snot and slime and gleet. We are biology. We are reminded of this at the beginning and the end, at birth and at death. In between we do what we can to forget."
— Mary Roach

"It is the mind that speaks a woman's heart, not the vaginal walls."
— Mary Roach (Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex)

"All good research-whether for science or for a book-is a form of obsession."
— Mary Roach

"Instead, I quietly excused myself and went to the bar, to commune with spirits I know how to relate to."
— Mary Roach (Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife)

"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)

"[I]t is the mind that speaks a woman's heart, not the vaginal walls."
— 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 guy is smarter than anyone I know. If you were to open his head, his brain would burst out like an airbag."
— Mary Roach (Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife)