I've read plenty of amazing science pieces where the writers don't hang out in labs. I just have fun doing it. And I get rewarded for it; I get gushy, especially when kids tell me they expected to be bored by my books, but weren't.
Mary RoachRead
I'm drawn to the taboos that surround the human body. I find it fascinating that we are repelled by many of the acts and processes that keep us alive.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote explores the irony of societal taboos surrounding natural human processes.
Mary Roach highlights the intriguing paradox of how society often reacts with disgust or repulsion to the natural functions of the human body, despite these functions being essential for life. By addressing these taboos, she invites reflection on the cultural perceptions that shape our understanding of human existence and mortality.
Themes
TaboosHuman BodyFascinationLifeRepulsion
In practice
Example use cases
During a lecture on human anatomy, one might reference this quote to encourage students to rethink their perspectives on the human body.
More from Mary Roach
All quotes βFollow your instincts. Do the kind of writing you love to do and do best. 'Stiff' was an oddball book - I mean, a funny book about cadavers? - and I worried that it would be too unconventional. In the end, that's what has made it a success, I think.
Mary RoachRead
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 RoachRead
I began thinking about my skeleton, this solid, beautiful thing inside me that I would never see.
Mary RoachRead
I walk up and down the rows. The heads look like rubber halloween masks. They also look like human heads, but my brain has no precedent for human heads on tables or in roasting pans or anywhere other than on top of a human bodies, and so I think it has chosen to interpret the sight in a more comforting manner. - Here we are at the rubber mask factory. Look at the nice men and woman working on the masks.
Mary RoachRead
In my experience, the most staunchly held views are based on ignorance or accepted dogma, not carefully considered accumulations of facts. The more you expose the intricacies and realtities of the situation, the less clear-cut things become.
Mary RoachRead
Similar quotes
As for myself: I had come to the conclusion that there was nothing sacred about myself or any human being, that we were all machines, doomed to collide and collide and collide. For want of anything better to do, we became fans of collisions. Sometimes I wrote well about collisions, which meant I was a writing machine in good repair. Sometimes I wrote badly, which meant I was a writing machine in bad repair. I no more harbored sacredness than did a Pontiac, a mousetrap, or a South Bend Lathe.
Kurt VonnegutRead
The revealed and mystic literature of mankind bears ample testimony to the fact that religious experience has been too enduring and dominant in the history of mankind to be rejected as mere illusion. There seems to be no reason, then, to accept the normal level of human experience as fact and reject its other levels as mystical and emotional.
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In the stream, _x000D_ Rushing past _x000D_ To the dusty world, _x000D_ My fleeting form _x000D_ Casts no reflection.
DogenRead
If you describe things as better than they are, you are considered to be a romantic; if you describe things as worse than they are, you will be called a realist; and if you describe things exactly as they are, you will be thought of as a satirist.
Quentin CrispRead
The world is for thousands a freak show; the images flicker past and vanish; the impressions remain flat and unconnected in the soul. Thus they are easily led by the opinions of others, are content to let their impressions be shuffled and rearranged and evaluated differently.
Johann Wolfgang Von GoetheRead
We have seen the mere distinction of color made in the most enlightened period of time, a ground of the most oppressive dominion ever exercised by man over man.
James MadisonRead