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. These thing are 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 animating spirit, I could imagine believing it to be here, for the simple reason that it is the human body's most animated organ.

— Mary Roach

There, just beyond his open palm, was our mother’s face. I wasn’t expecting it. We hadn’t requested a viewing, and the memorial service was closed-coffin. We got it anyway. They’d shampooed and waved her hair and made up her face. They’d done a great job, but I felt taken, as if we’d asked for the basic car wash, and they’d gone ahead and detailed her. Hey, I wanted to say, we didn’t order this. But of course I said nothing. Death makes us helplessly polite.

— Mary Roach

There wasn't an anhydrous lacrimal gland in the room...

— Mary Roach

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.)

— Mary Roach

The slang for the rectum is "prison wallet".

— Mary Roach

Think of it.' said Robert Rosebush, a doctor whose acquaintance I made at the start of this book. 'No engineer could design something as multifunctional and fine-tuned as an anus. To call someone an asshole is really bragging him up.

— Mary Roach

To keep your he-man jaw muscles from smashing your precious teeth, the only set you have, the body evolved an automated braking system faster and more sophisticated than anything on a Lexus. The jaw knows its own strength. The faster and more recklessly you close your mouth, the less force the muscles are willing to apply.

— Mary Roach

To the rocket scientist, you are a problem. You are the most irritating piece of machinery he or she will ever have to deal with. You and your fluctuating metabolism, your puny memory, your frame that comes in a million different configurations. Furthermore, you are unpredictable. Furthermore, you're inconstant. Furthermore, you take weeks to fix. The engineer must worry about the water and oxygen and food you'll need in space, about how much extra fuel it will take to launch your shrimp cocktail and irradiated beef tacos. A solar cell or a thruster nozzle is stable and undemanding. It does not excrete or panic or fall in love with the mission commander. It has no ego. Its structural elements don't start to break down without gravity, and it works just fine without sleep. To me, you are the best thing to happen to rocket science. The human being is the machine that makes the whole endeavor so endlessly intriguing.

— Mary Roach

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.

— Mary Roach

Viagra isn't the only drug being prescribed off-label for women with arousal problems. Los Angeles urologist Jennifer Berman told me some doctors are prescribing low doses of Ritalin. Drugs like Ritalin improve a person's focus, so it stands to reason that it would make it easier to stay attuned to subtle changes taking place in one's body. 'It enables a woman to focus o the task at hand,' said Berman, managing, though surely not intending, to make sex sound like homework.

— Mary Roach