Science Quote by Margaret Murray

"I'm so picky. People hate going to the movies with me" lands like a throwaway confession, but its power is in the mismatch between subject and speaker. Margaret Murray lived a century that demanded women in science be twice as competent and half as loud. So she frames a social friction - one so ordinary it could be dinner-party chatter - as a personal quirk, not a professional posture. The line’s comedy is self-protective: she leads with "I'm so picky" to preempt the harsher label others might apply (difficult, fussy, ungrateful), then delivers the punchline about people refusing to go with her, which turns judgement into a joke she controls.

The subtext is quality standards disguised as personality. "Picky" is a domestic, feminized word, safer than "rigorous" or "discerning", especially for a scientist whose authority could be socially penalized. In a world of sloppy evidence, sloppy arguments, and sloppy entertainment, she’s confessing that she can’t switch off the part of her brain trained to notice seams. Movies become a proxy for everything: if she won’t tolerate lazy plotting or cheap sentiment on screen, imagine what she refuses in a lab, a lecture hall, or a committee meeting.

Context matters, too: film was becoming mass culture, a shared, communal pastime. Her pickiness makes her a minor dissident against consensus fun. The cost is loneliness; the benefit is integrity. It’s a compact portrait of someone who knows that standards isolate - and keeps them anyway.