Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
All the clothes in my closet are Oakland, California, clothes. You can't wear those anywhere else. The barometric pressure drops and then where are you?
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.
Bodily fluids and solids are universally the most disgusting things we as human beings can come upon, but as long as they are inside us, it's part of you.
I have a nice little office, with a nice little window in it, but I do basically spend huge amounts of time in what you could consider solitary confinement.
I didn't really realize that writing... would be fun and people would pay you to do it. Being an astronaut is a glory profession, and so is writing, in a way.
I write with a sense of my future readers being ever on the verge of setting down the book and pronouncing it a bore. Fear and insecurity are great motivators.
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.
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.
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.
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.'
The suffix 'naut' comes from the Greek and Latin words for ships and sailing. Astronaut suggests 'a sailor in space.' Chimponaut suggests 'a chimpanzee in sailor pants'.
Science is you! It's your head, it's your dog, it's your iPhone - it's the world. How do you see that as boring? If it's boring, it's because you're learning it from a textbook.
I don't write on topics that require a lot of urgency. But in 'Stiff,' I wanted to change people's hearts about organ donation. Whenever I get a chance, I try to talk about that.
I spend a lot of my time on the phone, pestering people. 'What's new in your lab? Can I come visit your lab? When can I come visit your lab?' I'm basically a professional pesterer.
I'm always imposing my taste in books on others. I hope that people enjoy being surprised by a book they might not otherwise read - I enjoy the surprise myself when others do this to me.
Ultimately, the problem is that sex is perceived as a personal, intimate thing, not in the realm of science. But that's not true. It's physiology; it's anatomy. It deserves to be studied.
My books are not really books; theyre 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.
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.
I don't know of many people who've done sex research with an eye toward people saying sex is bad for you, except for the promiscuity and cervical cancer link - which is actually a valid discovery.
Spacewalking is a little like rock climbing in that everything, including and especially oneself, must be tethered or docked at all times. If you forget to tether a tool, it's gone. Ditto yourself.
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.
Meteorite hunting is not for wimps. The best places to look are also the coldest and windiest. You need very old ice, and you need wind, lots of it, strong and unrelenting. Antarctica fits the bill.
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.
I dont 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.
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.
I've always been a bit of a space geek. I wrote an article years ago about the neutral buoyancy tank, which is this biblically sized pool where they train astronauts. And it was just the coolest thing.
When you buy my books, you kind of know what you're in for. It's kind of self-selecting. If you have a delicate sensibility, and you're easily grossed out, you probably will never read one of my books.
Viagra does have a physiological effect, but it doesn't make women feel aroused. Nowadays, researchers are looking at drugs that affect the central nervous system rather than blood flow to the genitals.
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.
Masters points out that the heterosexuals were at a disadvantage, as they do not benefit from what he called “gender empathy”. Doing unto your partner as you would do unto yourself only works well when you're gay.
If ergonomists have their way, future products won't be built for some hypothetical average person but will conform to the biomechanical needs of whatever particular human body happens to come into contact with them.
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.
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.
I make lists to keep my anxiety level down. If I write down 15 things to be done, I lose that vague, nagging sense that there are an overwhelming number of things to be done, all of which are on the brink of being forgotten.
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?'
Life contains these things: leakage and wickage and discharge, pus and snot and slime and gleet. 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.
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.
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.
Yes, the money could be better spent on Earth. But would it? Since when has money saved by government redlining been spent on education and cancer research? It is always squandered. Let's squander some on Mars. Let's go out and play.
It seems odd to think of tasting without any perceptive experience, but you are doing it right now. Humans have taste receptor cells in the gut, the voice box, the upper esophagus. But only the tongue's receptors report to the brain.
The way I see it, being dead is not terribly far off from being on a cruise ship. Most of your time is spent lying on your back. The brain has shut down. The flesh begins to soften. Nothing much new happens, and nothing is expected of you.
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.
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.
Eighty percent of flavor comes from your nose, including a set of internal nostrils. When you chew food and hold it in your mouth, the gases that are released goes into these nostrils. People who wolf their food are missing some of the flavor.
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.
They say that women's sexual peaks are in their 30s or 40s, and I think that it happens because they're more comfortable. It's not some hormonal change that happens at that age. Of course, it would be nice to have more physiological insight on that.
Follow 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.
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.
Chew on this: Human teeth can detect a grain of sand or grit 10 microns in diameter. A micron is 1/25,000 of an inch. If you shrank a Coke can until it was the diameter of a human hair, the letter O in the product name would be about 10 microns across.
I think that the women's magazines and a lot of those quick tips for better sex, I think that they do people a disservice, sometimes, because they become very focused on - they're thinking, 'Okay, I read that I should do this, and am I doing it right?'