Mary Roach Quotes

Navy personnel began clamoring for it. To the embarrassment of many, the current Navy working uniform is a blue camouflage print. Unsure whether perhaps I was missing the point, I asked a Navy commander about the rationale. He looked down at his trousers and sighed. "That's so no one can see you if you fall overboard." No ~ Mary Roach

If you lower your head to within a foot or two of an infested corpse - and this I truly don't recommend - you can hear them feeding. Arpad pinpoints the sound. "Rice Krispies." Ron frowns. Ron used to like Rice Krispies. ~ Mary Roach

I like the term "decedent." It's as though the man weren't dead, but merely involved in some sort of protracted legal dispute. For evident reasons, mortuary science is awash with euphemisms. "Don't say stiff, corpse, cadaver," scolds The Principles and Practice of Embalming. "Say decedent, remains or Mr. Blank. Don't say 'keep.' Say 'maintain preservation.' ... "Wrinkles are "acquired facial markings." Decomposed brain that filters down through a damaged skull and bubbles out the nose is "frothy purge. ~ Mary Roach

How is it that we find Christina Aguilera more interesting than the inside of our own bodies? ~ Mary Roach

* Kissing is a less aggressive form of bacterial transplant. Studies of three different gingivitis-causing bacteria have documented migration from spouse to spouse. Periodontically speaking, an affair might be viewed as a form of bacteriotherapy. ~ Mary Roach

And ever since, the U.S. Army has gone confidently into battle, knowing that when cows attack, their men will be ready. For ~ Mary Roach

The anonymity of body parts facilitates the necessary dissociations of cadaveric research: This is not a person. This is just tissue. It has no feelings, and no one has feelings for it. It's okay to do things to it which, were it a sentient being, would constitute torture. ~ Mary Roach

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

It's the reason we say "pork" and "beef" instead of "pig" and "cow." Dissection and surgical instruction, like meat-eating, require a carefully maintained set of illusions and denial. ~ Mary Roach

One of the things I love about manned space exploration is that it forces people to unlace certain notions of what is and isn't acceptable. And possible. It's amazing what sometimes gets accomplished via an initially jarring but ultimately harmless shift in thinking. ~ Mary Roach

I used to do my best thinking while staring out airplane windows. The seat-back video system put a stop to that. Now I sit and watch old' Friends' and 'Everybody Loves Raymond' episodes. Walking is good, but here again, technology has interfered. I like to listen to iTunes while I walk home. I guess I don't think anymore. ~ Mary Roach

I'm one of those goobers who comes out of the polling place actually wearing the 'I VOTED' sticker on my jacket. ~ Mary Roach

It's amazing what sometimes gets accomplished via an initially jarring but ultimately harmless shift in thinking. Is cutting the organs out of a dead man and stitching them into someone else barbaric and disrespectful, or is it a straightforward operation to save multiple lives? Does crapping into a Baggie while sitting 6 inches away from your crewmate represent a collapse of human dignity or a unique and comic form of intimacy? ~ Mary Roach

It's this mood, these sentiments - the excitement of exploration and the surprises and delights of travel to foreign locales - that I hope to inspire with this book. ~ Mary Roach

I get really excited about specific therapies, personalized therapies. Like, let's say, taking a piece of someone's tumor and testing a bunch of treatments in a lab and being able to come up with the right therapy for that specific patient. ~ Mary Roach

It is difficult to put words to the smell of decomposing human. It is dense and cloying, sweet but not flower-sweet. Halfway between rotting fruit and rotting meat. ~ Mary Roach

The staff played hot potato with my call until someone could locate the Person in Charge of Lying to the Press. The PCLP said that the room that houses the base archives is locked. And that only the curator would have a key. And that Holloman currently has no curator. Evidently the new curator's first task would be to find a way to open the archives. ~ Mary Roach

Sipski defines orgasm as a reflex of the autonomic nervous system that can be either facilitated or inhibited by cerebral input (thoughts and feelings). ~ Mary Roach

Wallen, like Masters and Johnson, thinks it's possible that a majority of the so-called vaginal orgasms being had during intercourse are in reality clitoral orgasms. But unlike Masters and Johnson, he doesn't suggest that most women are having them easily. He believes, like Bonaparte, that the women having them - the paraclitoridiennes of the world - are an anatomically distinct group whose sexual response is different from that of the majority of women. And that maybe these women are where the whole notion of the vaginal orgasm originally came from. ~ Mary Roach

I agree with Dr. Makris. Does that mean I would let someone blow up my dead foot to help save the feet of NATO land mine clearers? It does. And would I let someone shoot my dead face with a nonlethal projectile to help prevent accidental fatalities? I suppose I would. What wouldn't I let someone do to my remains? I can think of only one experiment I know of that, were I a cadaver, I wouldn't want anything to do with. This particular experiment wasn't done in the name of science or education or safer cars or better-protected soldiers. It was done in the name of religion. ~ Mary Roach

My books are not really books; they're endless chains of distraction shoved inside a cover. Many of them begin at the search box of Pub Med, an Internet database of medical journal articles. ~ Mary Roach

Any time you can take a book a little beyond the realm of pure entertainment, I think it's a good thing. But I don't really have it on my to-do list when I write a book. It just evolves naturally during the process of immersing yourself in a subject. ~ Mary Roach

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

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

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

People can't anticipate how much they'll miss the natural world until they are deprived of it. I have read about submarine crewmen who haunt the sonar room, listening to whale songs and colonies of snapping shrimp. Submarine captains dispense 'periscope liberty'- a chance to gaze at clouds and birds and coastlines and remind themselves that the natural world still exists. I once met a man who told me that after landing in Christchurch, New Zealand, after a winter at the South Pole research station, he and his companions spent a couple days just wandering around staring in awe at flowers and trees. At one point, one of them spotted a woman pushing a stroller. 'A baby!' he shouted, and they all rushed across the street to see. The woman turned the stroller and ran. ~ Mary Roach

Another group tried putting a new type of protective boot onto the hind leg of a mule deer for testing. Given that deer lack toes and heels and people lack hooves, and that no country I know of employs mule deer in land mine clearance, it is hard - though mildly entertaining - to try to imagine what the value of such a study could have been. ~ Mary Roach

People are surprisingly off put just by saliva, the substance that you carry around in your mouth. You swallow it. You have no objection to it. But then it leaves your body, and you're just revolted. So it - that - just that right there to me is a fascinating thing. ~ Mary Roach

Mir astronaut Jerry Linenger writes in his memoir that he was surprised to find a bottle of cognac in one arm of his spacesuit and a bottle of whiskey in the other. (Linenger was the Frank Burns of space exploration: ~ Mary Roach

You do not question an author who appears on the title page as T.V.N. Persaud, M.D., Ph.D., D.Sc., F.R.C.Path. (Lond.), F.F.Path. (R.C.P.I.), F.A.C.O.G. ~ Mary Roach

It would be especially comforting to believe that I have the answer to the question, What happens when we die? Does the light just go out and that's that - the million-year nap? Or will some part of my personality, my me-ness, persist? What will that feel like? What will I do all day? Is there a place to plug in my laptop? ~ Mary Roach

With charm comes charm's sidekick, dilapidation. ~ Mary Roach

It tastes like water spiked with strange. ~ Mary Roach

Nineteenth-centuryoperating"theaters"hadmoretodowithmedicalinstructionthanwithsaving patients'lives.Ifyoucould,youstayedoutofthematallcost. Foronething,youwerebeingoperatedonwithoutanesthesia.(Thefirstoperationsunderetherdidn't takeplaceuntil1846.)Surgicalpatientsinthelate1700sandearly1800scouldfeeleverycut,stitch,and probingfinger.Theywereoftenblindfolded - thismayhavebeenoptional,notunlikethefiringsquad hood - andinvariablyboundtotheoperatingtabletokeepthemfromwrithingandflinchingor,quite possibly,leapingfromthetableandfleeingintothestreet.(Perhapsowingtothepresenceofanaudience, patientsunderwentsurgerywithmostoftheirclotheson.) ~ Mary Roach

If you could really guarantee that the money would be spent on something more worthwhile, I'd say, absolutely, scrap the space program, but it never works that way. ~ Mary Roach

When you get right down to it, there is no dignified way to go, be it decomposition, incineration, dissection, tissue digestion, or composting. They're all, bottom line, a little disagreeable. It takes the careful application of a well-considered euphemism - burial, cremation, anatomical gift-giving, water reduction, ecological funeral - to bring it to the point of acceptance. ~ Mary Roach

The terms "idiot" and "lunatic" were acceptable diagnostic terms in England up until 1959. "Imbecile" and "feeble-minded person" were, likewise, listed as official categories in the 1913 Mental Deficiency Act. England has always lagged a bit behind in discarding outdated terms for the disadvantaged. When I was there in 1980, it was still possible to shop for used clothing at the local Spastic Shop. That is, compared to the United States, where it takes, oh, about twenty-five minutes for a diagnostic euphemism to become a conversational faux pas. ~ Mary Roach

One of the maddening ironies of writing books is that it leaves so little time for reading others'. My bedside is piled with books, but it's duty reading: books for book research, books for review. The ones I pine for are off on a shelf downstairs. ~ Mary Roach

The human organism is built for tension and relaxation, work and sleep. The principle of life is rhythm. ~ Mary Roach

For the most part, if somebody approaches me and says, 'I'd like to interview you,' who am I to say no, when I spend all my days going, 'Hello, you don't know me. I'd like to ask you some questions. Do you have a little time?' ~ Mary Roach

Hydromedusa tectifera are, like post-war Nazis, native to Argentina, Paraguay, and Brazil. ~ Mary Roach

Under the section heading "Experiments with Human Subjects" – a heading that, were I a doctor previously employed by Nazi Germany, I might have rephrased – ~ Mary Roach

Science has the answer to every question that can be asked. However, science reserves the right to change that answer should additional data become available. ~ Mary Roach

One young woman's tribute describes unwrapping her cadaver's hands and being brought up short by the realization that the nails were painted pink. "The pictures in the anatomy atlas did not show nail polish", she wrote. "Did you choose the color? Did you think that I would see it? I wanted to tell you about the inside of your hands. I want you to know you are always there when I see patients. When I palpate an abdomen, yours are the organs I imagine. When I listen to a heart, I recall holding your heart. ~ Mary Roach

What I am getting at is that there is a point at which efficiency crosses over into lunacy, and the savings in money or resources cease to be worthwhile in light of the price paid in other ways. ~ Mary Roach

Compressed into boxes, packed in sawdust, ... trussed up in sacks, roped up like hams ... ~ Mary Roach

You won't see me writing about particle physics, or even planetary geology, or chemistry. I practically failed chemistry, and if I had to write a book in any of those areas, I don't think it would go well. ~ Mary Roach

I am not, by trade or character, a spotlight operator. I'm the goober with a flashlight, stumbling into corners and crannies, not looking for anything specific but knowing when I've found it. ~ Mary Roach

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. ~ Mary Roach

Loden loves guns, loves to talk about them. Right now he's trying to talk about them with me, a distinctly trying experience for I keep shepherding the conversation back to dead bodies which Loden clearly doesn't enjoy very much. You would think that a man who felt comfortable extolling the virtues of hollow point bullets ("Expands to twice its size and just thumps that person.") would be okay talking about dead bodies, but apparently not. "You just cringe," he said when I mentioned the prospect of shooting into human cadaver tissue. Then he made a noise that I transcribed in my notes as olllggg. ~ Mary Roach

Every mode of travel has its signature mental aberration. ~ Mary Roach

Anne Marie's beauty and style belie a down-and-dirty education in the particulars of practical AI (artificial insemination). She has miked a boar of his prodigious ejaculate
over two hundred milliliters (a cup), as compared to a man's three milliliters
and she has done it with her hand. For, unlike stallions and bulls, boars don't cotton to artificial vaginas. (in part, because their penis, like their tail, is corkscrewed.) AI techs must squeeze the organ in their hand
hard and without letup
for the entire duration of the ejaculation: from five to fifteen minutes. "You should see the size of their hands," she says, of the men and women who regular ejaculate boars. ~ Mary Roach

If I couldn't use food or love to define contentment, I would use reading. ~ Mary Roach

When I'm done with a book, I always give it to someone with expertise in the topic and tell them to flag all of my stupid mistakes. ~ Mary Roach

Téléclitoridienne means simply "female of the distant clitoris," but it had a lovely, aristocratic ring to it - calling to mind a career woman in heels and sweater set, cabling reports from her home in Biarritz. At the very least, it had a nicer ring to it than "frigid. ~ Mary Roach

When someone tells me, 'Oh, we have so many problems on Earth; space exploration costs too much money,' I say, 'I absolutely agree with you. But I still hope we do it.' ~ Mary Roach

Everybody is going to die, so people are enthralled by the possibility that they don't have to completely die, that there is something that comes afterward. It's like if you're going to France for the summer, you're going to read up on it. Everyone just wants to know where they're going, or if they're going anywhere. ~ Mary Roach

While he attends to his rats, Persinger gives me the lowdown on the haunt theory. Why would a certain type of electromagnetic field make one hear things or sense a presence? What's the mechanism? The answer hinges on the fact that exposure to electromagnetic fields lowers melatonin levels. Melatonin, he explains, is an anti-convulsive; if you have less of it in your system, your brain - in particular, your right temporal lobe - will be more prone to tiny epileptic-esque microseizures and the subtle hallucinations these seizures can cause. ~ Mary Roach

Penguins can shut down digestion by lowering the temperature inside their stomach to the point where the gastric juices are no longer active. The stomach becomes a kind of cooler to carry home the fish they've caught for their young. Penguins' hunting grounds may be several days' journey from the nest. Without this handy refrigerated mode, the swallowed fish would be completely digested by the time the adults get back - like ~ Mary Roach

LOL is rarely OL, or even really L. A real out-loud laugh - not the forced social variety, which is closer to barking than laughing - is uncommon among adults. ~ Mary Roach

Cadavers' intestines hanging like a parade streamers off the sides of tables, skulls bobbing in boiling pots, organs strewn on the floor being eaten by dogs ... ~ Mary Roach

We exist in this weirdly schizo culture, where sex is everywhere in the media, and yet, at the same time, you don't sit down and have a conversation about what you did in bed last night with your friends. Despite the ubiquity of sex, it's still a taboo when it comes to day-to-day conversation. ~ Mary Roach

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. ~ Mary Roach

Back in the 1980s when everyone looked a bit off, my friend Tim and his brothers had some publicity shots taken of their band. Eventually they sold the rights to a stock photo agency. Years later, one of the images turned up on a greeting card. The inside said, Greetings from the Dork Club. ~ Mary Roach

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

If you found this book in the New Age section of your local bookstore, it was grossly misshelved, and you should put it down at once. If you found it while browsing Gardening, or Boats and Ships, it was also misshelved, but you might enjoy it anyway ~ 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

Heroism doesn't always happen in a burst of glory. Sometimes small triumphs and large hearts change the course of history. Sometimes a chicken can save a man's life. ~ Mary Roach

I don't fear death so much as I fear its prologues: loneliness, decrepitude, pain, debilitation, depression, senility. After a few years of those, I imagine death presents like a holiday at the beach. ~ Mary Roach

Though it's harder to justify the use of a cadaver for practicing nose jobs than it is for practicing coronary bypasses, it is justifiable nonetheless. Cosmetic surgery exists, for better or for worse, and it's important, for the sake of those who undergo it, that the surgeons who do it are able to do it well. ~ Mary Roach

For me, hands are hard." She looks up from what she's doing. "Because you're holding this disconnected hand, and it's holding you back." Cadavers occasionally effect a sort of accidental humanness that catches the medical professional off guard. I once spoke to an anatomy student who described a moment in the lab when she realized that the cadaver's arm was around her waist. It becomes difficult, under circumstances such as these, to retain one's clinical remove. ~ Mary Roach

The writing is always the easy part, provided I can get the good material. It's the getting of the good material that's a challenge. ~ Mary Roach

How about suicide rate. And what a shame to lose them after they've made it back. We keep them alive, but we don't teach them how to live. ~ Mary Roach

If you get a colonoscopy, you should really insist they give you no drugs - then you do get to see what it's like to swim through your own intestines. ~ Mary Roach

Entomologists have a name for young flies, but it is an ugly name, an insult. Let's not use the word "maggot." Let's use a pretty word. Let's use "hacienda. ~ Mary Roach

For the scientists, they're kind of puzzled and pleased that somebody finds their work interesting. It makes it fun for me. I feel like I've sort of turned over a stone that hasn't been turned over. ~ Mary Roach

(What she perhaps didn't realize is that the embalming fluid pumped into the veins expands the body's erectile tissues, with the result that male anatomy lab cadavers may be markedly better endowed in death than they were in life.) ~ Mary Roach

Breast milk and amniotic fluid carry the flavors of the mother's foods, and studies consistently show that babies grow up to be more accepting of flavors they've sampled while in the womb and while breastfeeding. ~ Mary Roach

Last year, I was conversing by e-mail with an acquaintance who was investigating the black market in cadaver parts. She came into possession of a sales list for a company that provides organs and tissues for research. On the list was "vagina with clitoris." She did not believe that there could be a legitimate research purpose for cadaver genitalia. She assumed the researcher had procured the part to have sex with it. I replied that physiologists and people who study sexual dysfunction still have plenty to learn about female arousal and orgasm, and that I could, with little trouble, imagine someone needing such a thing. Besides, I said to this woman, if the guy wanted to nail the thing, do you honestly think he'd have bothered with the clitoris? ~ Mary Roach

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

Upon the occasion of history's first manned flight - in the 1780's aboard the Montgolfier brothers' hot-air balloons - someone asked Franklin what use he saw in such frivolity. "What use," he replied, "is a newborn baby? ~ Mary Roach

My interpreter Sayuri is folding a piece of notebook paper. She is at step 21, where the crane's body is inflated. The directions show a tiny puff besides an arrow pointing at the bird. It makes sense if you already know what to do. Otherwise, it's wonderfully surreal: Put a cloud inside a bird. ~ Mary Roach

The early anatomists were dealing with a chronic shortage of bodies for dissection, and consequently were motivated to come up with ways to preserve the ones they managed to obtain. Blanchard's textbook was the first to cover arterial embalming. He describes opening up an artery, flushing the blood out with water, and pumping in alcohol. I've been to frat parties like that. ~ Mary Roach

Youdon'thaveto steponabodytocarrythesmellsofdeathwithyouonyourshoes.Forreasonswehavejustseen,thesoil aroundacorpseissoddenwiththeliquidsofhumandecay.Byanalyzingthechemicalsinthissoil,people likeArpadcantellifabodyhasbeenmovedfromwhereitdecayed.Iftheuniquevolatilefattyacidsand compoundsofhumandecayaren'tthere,thebodydidn'tdecomposethere. ~ Mary Roach

He will be lowered into a vat of liquid nitrogen and frozen. From here he will progress to the second chamber, where either ultrasound waves or mechanical vibration will be used to break his easily shattered self* into small pieces, more or less the size of ground chuck. The pieces, still frozen, will then be freeze-dried and used as compost for a memorial tree or shrub, either in a churchyard memorial park or in the family's yard. ~ Mary Roach

Firther evidence of the difficulties of reduced-gravity-sex comes from the sea otter. To help hold the female in place, the male will typically pull the female's head back and grab onto her nose with his teeth. "Our vets have had to do rhinoplasty on some of the females", says Michaelle Stadler, a sea otter reseach coordinator at the Monterey Bay Aquarium. Sex can also be traumatic for the male otter, who endures aerial pecking attacks by sea gulls mistaking his erect penis for a novel ocean delicacy. ~ Mary Roach

Editors are more concerned with the first chapters of a book; that's what everyone reads first in the bookstore or in the online sample. ~ Mary Roach

A bright light at the end of a tunnel can seem warm and inviting, or it can seem mysterious and terrifying. People of the world "all working on their arts and crafts" can seem like heaven or, if you're me, hell. ~ 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 emergency evacuations, the most prominent factor influencing survival was gender (followed closely by proximity to exit). Adult males were by far the most likely to get out alive. Why? Presumably because they pushed everyone else out of the way. ~ Mary Roach

A few words in defense of military scientists. I agree that squad leaders are in the best position to know what and how much their men and women need to bring on a given mission. But you want those squad leaders to be armed with knowledge, and not all knowledge comes from experience. Sometimes it comes from a pogue at USUHS who's been investigating the specific and potentially deadly consequences of a bodybuilding supplement. Or an army physiologist who puts men adrift in life rafts off the dock at a Florida air base and discovers that wetting your uniform cools you enough to conserve 74 percent more of your body fluids per hour. Or the Navy researcher who comes up with a way to speed the recovery time from travelers' diarrhea. These things matter when it's 115 degrees and you're trying to keep your troops from dehydrating to the point of collapse. There's no glory in the work. No one wins a medal. And maybe someone should. ~ Mary Roach

I will tell you sincerely and without exaggeration that the best part of lunch today at the NASA Ames cafeteria is the urine. It is clear and sweet, though not in the way mountain streams are said to be clear and sweet. More in the way of Karo syrup. The urine has been desalinated by osmotic pressure. Basically it swapped molecules with a concentrated sugar solution. Urine is a salty substance (though less so than the NASA Ames chili), and if you were to drink it in an effort to rehydrate yourself, it would have the opposite effect. But once the salt is taken care of and the distasteful organic molecules have been trapped in an activated charcoal filter, urine is a restorative and surprisingly drinkable lunchtime beverage. I was about to use the word unobjectionable, but that's not accurate. People object. They object a lot. ~ Mary Roach

In terms of sustainability and what we eat and what its footprint is on the environment and the consequences of eating one thing versus another, obviously it makes a lot of sense to be eating insects. They're incredibly plentiful. They've got a very short turnover rate. You could be eating termites. ~ Mary Roach

People don't appreciate their intestines until something goes wrong. But I always hope that people gain a little appreciation for their guts. ~ Mary Roach

Worry lives a long way from rational thought.
Self ~ Mary Roach

The act of vomiting deserves your respect. It's an orchestral event of the gut. ~ Mary Roach

As when astronaut Mike Mulhane was asked by a NASA psychiatrist what epitaph he'd like to have on his gravestone, Mulhane answered, "A loving husband and devoted father," though in reality, he jokes in "Riding Rockets," "I would have sold my wife and children into slavery for a ride into space. ~ Mary Roach

Here's the other thing I think about. It makes little sense to try to control what happens to your remains when you are no longer around to reap the joys or benefits of that control. People who make elaborate requests concerning disposition of their bodies are probably people who have trouble with the concept of not existing. [...] I imagine it is a symptom of the fear, the dread, of being gone, of the refusal to accept that you no longer control, or even participate in, anything that happens on earth. I spoke about this with funeral director Kevin McCabe, who believes that decisions concerning the disposition of a body should be mad by the survivors, not the dead. "It's non of their business what happens to them whey the die," he said to me. While I wouldn't go that far, I do understand what he was getting at: that the survivors shouldn't have to do something they're uncomfortable with or ethically opposed to. Mourning and moving on are hard enough. Why add to the burden? If someone wants to arrange a balloon launch of the deceased's ashes into inner space, that's fine. But if it is burdensome or troubling for any reason, then perhaps they shouldn't have to. ~ 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

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

The heyday of spiritualism--with its seances and spirit communications zinging through the ether--coincided with the dawn of the electric age. The generation that so readily embraced spiritualism was the same generation that had been asked to accept such seeming witchery as electricity, telegraphy, radio waves, and telephonic communications--disembodied voices mysteriously travelling through space and emerging from a "receiver" hundreds of miles distant ~ Mary Roach