The Body: A Guide for Occupants

⚡️ 12 Quotes from the book

“I’ve said it before in another book, but I believe it’s worth repeating: the only thing special about the elements that make you is that they make you. That is the miracle of life.”

copy text

“Every day, it has been estimated, between one and five of your cells turn cancerous, and your immune system captures and kills them.”

copy text

“An interesting thing about touch is that the brain doesn’t just tell you how something feels, but how it ought to feel. That’s why the caress of a lover feels wonderful, but the same touch by a stranger would feel creepy or horrible. It’s also why it is so hard to tickle yourself.”

copy text

“The only really reliable way to transfer cold germs is physically by touch.”

copy text

“Every bit of penicillin made since that day is descended from that single random cantaloupe.”

copy text

“Just sitting quietly, doing nothing at all, your brain churns through more information in thirty seconds than the Hubble Space Telescope has processed in thirty years.”

copy text

“All that is really going in your mouth is texture and chemicals. It is your brain that reads these scentless, flavorless molecules and vivifies them for your pleasure. Your brownie is sheet music. It is your brain that makes it a symphony.”

copy text

“On top of all that, every person’s immune system is unique, making immune systems harder to generalize, harder to understand, and harder to treat when they go wrong. Moreover, the immune system doesn’t just deal with germs. It has to respond to toxins, drugs, cancers, foreign objects, and even your own state of mind.”

copy text

“By whatever means you measure it, we are pretty good at extracting energy from food, not because we have an especially dynamic metabolism but because of a trick we learned a very long time ago: cooking.”

copy text

“Whether or not a disease becomes epidemic is dependent on four factors: how lethal it is, how good it is at finding new victims, how easy or difficult it is to contain, and how susceptible it is to vaccines.”

copy text

“And sometimes cancer just seems to be cruelly random. About 10 percent of men and 15 percent of women who get lung cancer are not smokers, have not been exposed to known environmental hazards, or have not faced any other increased risks, as far as can be told.”

copy text

“The chances of reaching your 110th birthday are about one in seven million. It helps a lot to be a woman; they are ten times more likely to reach 110 than a man.”

copy text