Mary Roach Quotes

As a reporter you tend to seek coherence from your subject or your source - it all needs to add up and make sense. In truth, in reality, there's often a great deal of murkiness and muddiness, confusion and contradiction.

The truth is rarely pure and never simple.

I love telling stories, but I also am more aware now of how complex reality is and how difficult it is to really explain what happened or how I felt. Maybe that sometimes makes me a little bit vague, because I don't want to really put my finger on anything or set it in stone.

Reality is infinitely diverse, compared with even the subtlest conclusions of abstract thought, and does not allow of clear-cut and sweeping distinctions. Reality resists classification.

The more I see, the less I know.

What is not surrounded by uncertainty cannot be the truth.

The world is not a solid continent of facts sprinkled by a few lakes of uncertainties, but a vast ocean of uncertainties speckled by a few islands of calibrated and stabilized forms

The reality of a question is inevitably more complicated than we would like to suppose.

A man sees what he wants to see, And disregards the rest.

To be honest everything goes over my head a bit.

People are afraid of detail and complexity.

I do try to write in ways that reflect reality, and I think that reality is rarely simple.

The color of truth is gray.

Given a choice between their worldview and the facts, it's always interesting how many people toss the facts.

It's just not easy to explain to someone else what you don't understand yourself.

My books tend to have a lot of questions in them, and they tend to avoid black and white, for lack of a better metaphor.

As I said before, there are often disagreements as to what a particular set of facts mean. That is not at all unusual, and one shouldn't read into it more than is there.

Today, if you are not confused, you are not thinking clearly.

We live in a world of denial, and we don't know what the truth is anymore.

We can be absolutely certain only about things we do not understand.

Truth is a tendency.

There are many things that I don't understand.

Sometimes the truth is more than the sum of the facts.

Values are faithfully applied to the facts before us, while ideology overrides whatever facts call theory into question.

Facts matter, especially when they conflict with dogma and preconceived notions. Pretending otherwise has consequences.