418 Quotes by Mary Roach

No one goes out to play anymore. Simulation is becoming reality.

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.

…he was doing a breath hydrogen test. If you know the amount of hydrogen someone is exhaling orally, it's a simple matter to extrapolate the amount they're exhaling rectally. This is because a fixed percentage of hydrogen produced in the colon is absorbed into the blood and, and when it reaches the lungs, exhaled. The breath hydrogen test has given flatus researchers a simple, consistent measure of gas production that does not require the subject to fart into a balloon.

Taste - as in personal preference, discernment - is subjective. It's emphemeral, shaped by trends and fads. It's one part mouth and nose, two parts ego.

No one is excluded from the astronaut corps based on penis size.

Gravity is why there are suns and planets in the first place. It is practically God.

US government button specifications run to twenty-two pages. This fact on its own yields a sense of what it is like to design garments for the Army.

I don't know the ultimate fate of a suppressed fart.

He has a minor in explosives and the slightly bitter, misanthropic personality of someone who shouldn't.