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Quote by Arundhati Roy

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Arundhati Roy
Arundhati Roy

Arundhati Roy is an Indian author best known for her novel 'The God of Small Things', which won the Booker Prize in 1997. Her works often explore social and political issues such as class, race, and gender. more

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“The second or third time I watched Stamets show a video of a Cordyceps doing its diabolical thing to an ant—commandeering its body, making it do its bidding, and then exploding a mushroom from its brain in order to disseminate its genes—it occurred to me that Stamets and that poor ant had rather a lot in common. Fungi haven’t killed him, it’s true, and he probably knows enough about their wiles to head off that fate. But it’s also true that this man’s life—his brain!—has been utterly taken over by fungi; he has dedicated himself to their cause, speaking for the mushrooms in the same way that Dr. Seuss’s Lorax speaks for the trees. He disseminates fungal spores far and wide, helping them, whether by mail order or sheer dint of his enthusiasm, to vastly expand their range and spread their message.”

ScienceBrainAntsFungusCordycepsStamets
Book:How to Change Your Mind: The New Science of Psychedelics
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“Look at all the beautiful, delicate layers! It's a perfect mille-feuille! "Heh. I call it... ...Mushroom Mille-Feuille with Duxelles Filling. Eat up!" Incredible! The exciting flavors of multiple kinds of mushrooms meld together with the crispy, ultrathin layers of piecrust in a moist and magical harmony! "The main ingredient Rindo Kobayashi chose was shiitake mushrooms! She used olive oil to cook them into a confit, trapping and magnifying their natural umami flavor!" Wait... this tang! "Aah. Champignon mushrooms and shallots, sautéed to a golden brown in garlic and butter and then simmered to a paste in broth. Cracked nuts and heavy cream were blended in to make a Duxelles, which she then sandwiched between the Mille-Feuille layers. *Duxelles is a mushroom paste often used as a base for fillings or sauces.* A perfectly balanced tart note makes the salty savoriness of the confit stand out... ... while allowing the mellow sweetness of the shiitake to linger on the tongue! Though I can't put my finger on what this sour flavor is from. What is it?" "Ants.❤️ I extracted formic acid from ants and mixed it into my Duxelles!" "WAAAAH?!" Too much formic acid is poisonous, of course. But in small amounts it can be a wonderful culinary accent. It has no extraneous sweetness, just a sharp, invigoratingly tart tang. "Not only that, if you add it to a sweet base, it can create deeper, more nuanced flavors than the more commonly used citrus fruits.”

AntsMushroomsTangFormics
Book:食戟のソーマ 30 [Shokugeki no Souma 30]
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“The road was overgrown with dry, dust-decrepit grass. Whenever Zakhar Pavlovich sat to smoke, he saw pleasant forests on the ground, where the grass was trees. It was a complete little living world, with its own roads, its own warmth, and complete supplies for the everyday needs of the petty, preoccupied creatures. Zakhar Pavlovich kept the ants in his head for about three miles of his way after watching them, and finally thought, If only we were given ant or mosquito reason, then life could be smoothed over right away, without problems. Those minor things are great masters of the harmonious life. A man's a long way from that nimble fellow, the ant.”

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Book:Chevengur
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“Chu considered how to describe his feelings about Nelson. Finally, after digging through his mental storehouse of erudition, he settled on the words he wanted and spoke again. "There is an American author, Flannery O'Connor. She wrote something about one of her characters that I think may explain this man. To paraphrase . . . he could have been a good man if there had been someone there to shoot him every minute of his life.”

HorrorScience FictionAntsMilitary Science Fiction
Book:Sapience
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“Ants owe their superiority to their terrestrial life. This assertion may seem paradoxical, but consider the exceptional advantages afforded by a terrestrial medium to the development of their intellectual faculties, compared with an aerial medium! In the air there are the long flights without obstacles, the vertiginous journeys far from real bodies, the instability, the wandering about, the endless forget fulness of things and oneself. On the earth, on the contrary, there is not a movement that is not a contact and does not yield precise information, not a journey that fails to leave some reminiscence ; and as these journeys are determinate, it is inevitable that a portion of the ground incessantly traversed should be registered, together with its resources and its dangers, in the animal's imagination. Thus here results a closer and much more direct communication with the external world.”

NatureFreedomAnimalsInsectsAntsDeadlinesAerialTerrestrial
Book:Des Sociétés Animales (2e Éd.) (Éd.1878) (Sciences Sociales)
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“Ants owe their superiority to their terrestrial life. This assertion may seem paradoxical, but consider the exceptional advantages afforded by a terrestrial medium to the development of their intellectual faculties, compared with an aerial medium! In the air there are the long flights without obstacles, the vertiginous journeys far from real bodies, the instability, the wandering about, the endless forgetfulness of things and oneself. On the earth, on the contrary, there is not a movement that is not a contact and does not yield precise information, not a journey that fails to leave some reminiscence ; and as these journeys are determinate, it is inevitable that a portion of the ground incessantly traversed should be registered, together with its resources and its dangers, in the animal's imagination. Thus here results a closer and much more direct communication with the external world.”

NatureFreedomInsectsAntsAerialTerrestrial
Book:Des sociétés animales
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“Squatting in the coppery mud of the drainage ditch behind my cousin’s house, we searched for fish, saw none. We found a speckled frog instead, unspooling a long, gelatinous thread of black eggs in the water. Then fire ants— my feet a blaze of pain, a fumbling dance, and fact and memory begin to stutter. What happened next? What curses did I utter? And how did I ever get back over the fence? I remember having a kind of reverence for the whole affair: the pity I got, each bite growing large and lustrous as a pearl, my tight and swollen toes. I must have liked the pain. What else would make me prod again, again? A whole week hobbling barefoot on the lawn, and still I missed the welts when they were gone.”

PoetryAnts
Author:Chelsea Rathburn
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