Mary Roach Quotes

Once you realise that heroes die, everything becomes that much more terrifying.

War is the ultimate reality-based horror show.

Blood and death. That moves me.

In the beginning of the Great War, the emotions of Europe ran riot in a most horrible manner, first among the so-called 'living,' and then among the killed when they awoke.

To contemplate war is to think about the most horrible of human experiences.

War is horrible because it strangles youth.

It is a horrible fact that we can read in the daily paper, without interrupting our breakfast, numerical reckonings of death and destruction that ought to break our hearts or scare us out of our wits.

War is hell. Hollywood fantasizes about it and makes it look good... war sucks.

All I can really say is it's bloodier than hell. In this one I'm going to be much more direct and honest in my description of the actual killings and the crime scene.

There is nothing glamorous or romantic about war. It's mostly about random pointless death and misery.

I became a journalist at 17. A few hours later, I saw my first dead body, which was somewhat... colourful. That's when I learned you can go on throwing up after you run out of things to throw up.

I am profoundly fascinated by cruelty, fear, horror and death. My films show my preoccupation with violence, the pathology of violence.

I have seen heroics - soldiers saving other soldiers' lives - and horrors.

In the next war the survivors will envy the dead.

In order to endure death and horror one tends to kill ones own humanity, which is a much greater danger than not being able to bear it.

There is many a boy here to-day who looks on war as all glory, but, boys, it is all hell

A professional soldier understands that war means killing people, war means maiming people, war means families left without fathers and mothers. All you have to do is hold your first dying soldier in your arms, and have that terribly futile feeling that his life is flowing out and you can’t do anything about it. Then you understand the horror of war.

Bones inside clothes. That was war to me.

There are some similarities, of course (between Iraq and Vietnam). Death is terrible.

It was like the first time i saw a cadaver. For weeks afterward the cadavers head, or what was left of it - floated up behind my eggs and bacon at breakfast and in the face of Buddy Willard, who was responsible for my seeing it in the first place, and pretty soon I felt as though I were carrying that cadavers head around with me on a string, like some black, noseless balloon stinking of vinegar.

Stories come from violence, they come from sex. They come from death. They come from the dark places that everyone has to go to, kind of wants to, or doesn't, but needs to deal with. If you raise a kid to think everything is sunshine and flowers, they're going to get into the real world and die. That's the reason fairy tales are so creepy, because we need to encapsulate these things, to inoculate ourselves against them, so that when we're confronted by the genuine horror that is day-to-day life we don't go insane.

If I'd known how wrong I was - if I'd had any idea of the awful night that lay ahead - I'd have run after him and never returned to that disgusting circus of blood, that revolting circus of death.

They held each other and wept as the night closed its fist around their tiny shelter, and the world below them seethed with killers both living and dead.

A girl my age had been murdered in these woods and I'd seen her last terrified moments, watched her bleed to death in this forest. A life like mine had ended here, and it didn't matter how many times I'd seen deaths in movies, it wasn't the same, and I wasn't ever going to forget it.

As if you cut open a rag doll with a sill name, and found inside:Real intestines, real lungs, a beating heart and blood. A lot of hot, sticky blood.