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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 10ec537 | In short, I always vowed, one way or another, not to change. Not me. I needed the fierceness of vowing because I could scarcely help but notice..that it was mighty unlikely. | Annie Dillard | ||
| 27d1aab | Only after a writer lets literature shape her can she perhaps shape literature. In working-class France, when an apprentice got hurt, or when he got tired, the experienced workers said, "It is the trade entering his body." The art must enter the body, too." | art artist artistry discipline literature read reader reading the-writing-life write writer writing writing-advice | Annie Dillard | |
| 81e7e40 | Annie Dillard once said, how we spend our days is how we spend our lives. | Florence Williams | ||
| 159aa93 | It should surprise no one that the life of the writer--such as it is--is colorless to the point of sensory deprivation. Many writers do little else but sit in small rooms recalling the real world. This explains why so many books describe the author's childhood. A writer's childhood may well have been the occasion of his only firsthand experience. | Annie Dillard | ||
| 13fc3fe | The adult members of society adverted to the Bible unreasonably often. What arcana! Why did they spread this scandalous document before our eyes? If they had read it, I thought, they would have hid it. They didn't recognize the vivid danger that we would, through repeated exposure, catch a case of its wild opposition to their world. | Annie Dillard | ||
| 6f15feb | NASA might do well to adopt the Red Bull approach to branding and astronautics. Suddenly the man in the spacesuit is not an underpaid civil servant; he's the ultimate extreme athlete. Red Bull knows how to make space hip. | Mary Roach | ||
| 664598a | 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 su.. | blood colon extrapolate flatulence gas gulp hydrogen mary-roach | Mary Roach | |
| 4b8ea5c | How is it that we find Christina Aguilera more interesting than the inside of our own bodies? | Mary Roach | ||
| c64f496 | Gravity is why there are suns and planets in the first place. It is practically God. | space-travel | Mary Roach | |
| 2cbb0dd | 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 | ||
| 1866517 | 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 | ||
| 38330ec | 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 | ||
| bf99f6c | I remember watching Morin walk away from me, the endearing gait and the butt that got lubed for science, and thinking, 'Oh my god, they're just people. | Mary Roach | ||
| 82dd3e6 | The simplest strategy for bouts of noxious flatus is to not care. Or perhaps to take advantage of a gastroenterologist I know: get a dog. (To blame.) | flatulence humor science | Mary Roach | |
| 9985ac0 | Borman's dumping urine. Urine [in] approximately one minute." Two lines further along, we see Lovell saying, "What a sight to behold!" | Mary Roach | ||
| 2d7a684 | Riddle traveled a lot in his twenties and recalls being hit by a realization. So much of people's lives--their opportunities, their health and longevity--comes down to where they were born. "It's so random," he says." -- | Mary Roach | ||
| 9ba2994 | As brain cells die from oxygen starvation, euphoria sets in, and one last, grand erection.) | Mary Roach | ||
| 904e3d0 | Hydromedusa tectifera are, like post-war Nazis, native to Argentina, Paraguay, and Brazil. | Mary Roach | ||
| 3e3ffad | A patient on the way to surgery travels at twice the speed of a patient on the way to the morgue. Gurneys that ferry the living through hospital corridors move forward in an aura of purpose and push, flanked by caregivers with long strides and set faces, steadying IVs, pumping ambu bags, barreling into double doors. A gurney with a cadaver commands no urgency. It is wheeled by a single person, calmly and with little notice, like a shopping .. | Mary Roach | ||
| 3ebf489 | 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 | ||
| d8858ce | During World War II, when combat rations were tinned, meat hashes were a common entree because they worked well with the filling machines. "But the men wanted something they could chew, something into which they could 'sink their teeth,'" wrote food scientist Samuel Lepkovsky in a 1964 paper making the case against a liquid diet for the Gemini astronauts. He summed up the soldiers' take on potted meat: "We could undoubtedly survive on these.. | humor science | Mary Roach | |
| 7866010 | 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.. | Mary Roach | ||
| 9f32a3a | This book is a salute to the scientists and the surgeons, running along in the wake of combat, lab coats flapping. Building safer tanks, waging war on filth flies. Understanding turkey vultures. T | Mary Roach | ||
| 76fb1cc | There is her heart. I've never seen one beating.I had no idea they moved so much. You put your hand on your heart and you picture something pulsing slightly but basically still, like a hand on a desktop tapping Morse code. This things is going wild in there. It's a mixing-machine part, a stoat squirming in its burrow, an alien life form that's just won a Pontiac on The Price Is Right. If you were looking for the home of the human body's ani.. | humanity | Mary Roach | |
| bb7dd87 | 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 | ||
| 05fab55 | 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 | ||
| 5bf86f5 | Whereas the larger caliber .45 Colt revolver bullets caused the cattle to drop to the ground after three or four shots, the animals shot with smaller caliber .38 bullets failed even after ten shots to drop to the ground. And ever since the U.S. Army has gone confidently into battle knowing that when cows attack, their men will be ready. | Mary Roach | ||
| ff38102 | I like the term "decedent". It's as though the man weren't dead but merely involved in some sort of protracted legal dispute." | Mary Roach | ||
| 5a5bdd0 | The human digestive tract is like the Amtrak line from Seattle to Los Angeles: transit time is about thirty hours, and the scenery on the last leg is pretty monotonous. | humor science | Mary Roach | |
| 93e1912 | A wedding gown entails multilayering of expensive specialty fabrics for an outfit whose useful lifespan may come and go in a single afternoon. Much like a bomb suit. | Mary Roach | ||
| 0e45811 | 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. | dead dead-body dead-people | Mary Roach | |
| eb501b6 | Any discussion of the sexuality of the digestive tract must inevitably touch on the anus. Anal tissue is among the most densely innervated on the human body. It has to be. It requires a lot of information to do its job. The anus has to be able to tell what's knocking at its door: Is it solid, liquid, or gas? And then selectively release either all of it or one part of it. The consequences of a misread are dire. As Mike Jones put it, "You do.. | Mary Roach | ||
| 6820061 | 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 ex.. | Mary Roach | ||
| 4218ab1 | You may be thinking, Wow, that Mary Roach has her head up her ass. To which I say: Only briefly, and with the utmost respect. | Mary Roach | ||
| c8cf854 | You don't need proof. You just need an inclination | Mary Roach | ||
| e495986 | Ka was the essence of teh person: spirit, intelligence, feelings and passions, humor, grudges, annoying television theme songs, all the things that make a person a person and not a nematode. | Mary Roach | ||
| 8990c63 | Aspirin and ibuprofen combat inflammation everywhere but the stomach and bowel; there they create inflammation. | Mary Roach | ||
| 6dc0f29 | Caffeine is safe and effective but not without a downside. Depending on one's sensitivity, it has a half-life of six to eight hours. Even if you have no trouble falling asleep after drinking coffee late in the day, you may wake more easily during the night because your nervous system is still aroused, your brain attuned to sounds and other stimuli that would otherwise go unheeded. The more poorly you sleep, the more caffeine you tend to con.. | Mary Roach | ||
| 7f5ef19 | There is a famous study from the 1930s involving a group of orphanage babies who, at mealtimes, were presented with a smorgasbord of thirty-four whole, healthy foods. Nothing was processed or prepared beyond mincing or mashing. Among the more standard offerings--fresh fruits and vegetables, eggs, milk, chicken, beef--the researcher, Clara Davis, included liver, kidney, brains, sweetbreads, and bone marrow. The babies shunned liver and kidne.. | Mary Roach | ||
| d8ce3f8 | One more toot--just one single, solitary suggestion of the faintest shadow or suspicion of anything remotely approaching a toot--and may the Lord have mercy on your soul. | P.G. Wodehouse | ||
| 0182ba0 | I went into the kitchen ten minutes back. The cat was sitting on the mat." Beale's narrative style closely resembled that of a certain book I had read in my infancy. I wish I could remember its title. It was a well-written book." | P.G. Wodehouse | ||
| dbe0403 | I remember when I was a kid at school having to learn a poem of sorts about a fellow named Pig-something--a sculptor he would have been, no doubt--who made a statue of a girl, and what should happen one morning but that the bally thing suddenly came to life. A pretty nasty shock for the chap, of course, but the point I'm working round to is that there were a couple of lines that went, if I remember correctly: She starts. She moves. She seem.. | P.G. Wodehouse | ||
| 768f989 | We Woosters can bite the bullet. | p-g-wodehouse | P.G. Wodehouse | |
| 14f4554 | The club book was never intended to be light and titillated reading for the members. Its function is solely to acquaint those who are contemplating taking new posts with the foibles of prospective employers. This being so, there is no need for the record contained in the eighteen pages in which you figure. For I may hope, may I not, sir, that you will allow me to remain permanently in your service? | P.G. Wodehouse |