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. You are unpredictable. You're inconstant. 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
You're on Earth. There's no cure for that.
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Samuel Beckett
Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. <span style="margin:15px; display:block"></span>On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of...
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Carl Sagan
There is nothing new under the sun, but there are new suns.
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Octavia E. Butler
To respect a mystery is to make way for the answer.
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Criss Jami
I had aimed at Mars and was about to hit Venus unquestionably the all-time cosmic record for poor shots.
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Edgar Rice Burroughs
More Quotes By Mary Roach
It is astounding to me, and achingly sad, that with eighty thousand people on the waiting list for donated hearts and livers and kidneys, with sixteen a day dying there on that list, that more then half of the people in the position H's family...
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...
We are biology. We are reminded of this at the beginning and the end, at birth and at death. In between we do what we can to forget.
Many people will find this book disrespectful. There is nothing amusing about being dead, they will say. Ah, but there is.
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...
