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Fungi Quotes

Browse 75 quotes about Fungi.

Fungi Quotes

“A good upbringing is necessary for a long life, but sometimes the patience of the young trees is sorely tested. As I mentioned in chapter 5, "Tree Lottery," acorns and beechnuts fall at the feet of large "mother trees." Dr. Suzanne Simard, who helped discover maternal instincts in trees, describes mother trees as dominant trees widely linked to other trees in the forest through their fungal-root connections. These trees pass their legacy on to the next generation and exert their influence in the upbringing of the youngsters. "My" small beech trees, which have by now been waiting for at least eighty years, are standing under mother trees that are about two hundred years old -- the equivalent of forty-year-olds in human terms. The stunted trees can probably expect another two hundred years of twiddling their thumbs before it is finally their turn. The wait time is, however, made bearable. Their mothers are in contact with them through their root systems, and they pass along sugar and other nutrients. You might even say they are nursing their babies.”

TimeConnectionMothersTreesNursingFungiFungus
Book:The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate: Discoveries from a Secret World
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“Bacteria are so small they need to stick to things or they will wash away; to attach themselves, they produce a slime, the secondary result of which is that individual soil particles are bound together. [...] Fungal hyphae, too, travel through soil, sticking to them and binding them together, thread-like, into aggregates. [...] The soil food web, then, in addition to providing nutrients to roots in the rhizosphere, also helps create soil structure: the activities of its members bind soil particles together even as they provide for the passage of air and water through the soil. [...] The nets or webs fungi form around roots act as physical barriers to invasion and protect plants from pathogenic fungi and bacteria. Bacteria coat surfaces so thoroughly, there is no room for others to attach themselves. If something impacts these fungi or bacteria and their numbers drop or they disappear, the plant can easily be attacked.”

GardeningPlantsBacteriaFungiOrganic FarmingPlant LifeMicrobiologyOrganic GardeningSoil HealthAllotment
Book:Teaming with Microbes: A Gardener's Guide to the Soil Food Web
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“What sort of pasta are you making?" "Pasta con funghi." He watched as she took a bowl of strange, round, reddish brown mushrooms out of the larder. The air immediately filled with their rich, earthy scent. Ripe as a well-cellared cheese, but tinged with the odors of leaf mold and decay, it reminded him a little of the smell of offal in his native Roman dishes. "How many kinds of funghi do you cook with?" he asked. "Oh, hundreds. It just depends on what I find in the woods." "You pick these yourself?" "Of course." As the smell of funghi combined with the scent of hot butter and garlic in the frying pan, Bruno felt his nostrils flare. And not just his nostrils. The smell was stirring up his blood, awakening sensation in a part of him that had been quiescent for a long time.”

MushroomsPastaAphrodisiacFungiItalian Cooking
Book:The Food of Love
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“A tree’s most important means of staying connected to other trees is a “wood wide web” of soil fungi that connects vegetation in an intimate network that allows the sharing of an enormous amount of information and goods.”

CommunicationSoilTreesFungiFungus
Book:The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate: Discoveries from a Secret World
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“Anthropomorphism is usually thought of as an illusion that arises like a blister in soft human minds: untrained, undisciplined, unhardened. There are good reasons for this: when we humanise the world, we may prevent ourselves from understanding the lives of other organisms on their own terms. But are there things this stance might lead us to pass over – or forget to notice?”

FungiAnthropocentrismAnthropomorphismFungusMycology
Book:Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures
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“Fungi are decentralized intelligence networks. They send information multi-directionally, they constantly evolve and adapt based on feedback from their environment, they invent new molecules to collaborate... And they form a decentralized consensus on how to utilize resources, when to reproduce and what strategies to employ. This is how businesses and business ecosystems should be.”

BusinessMayflower PlymouthFungiMycologyBusiness EcosystemBusiness Systems
Author:Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr, CEO of Mayflower-Plymouth
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“Over the course of its more than ten-thousand-year life-span," she proclaimed, "Białowieża Forest has offered shelter not only to Europe's sole surviving megafauna and the royals who legislated its exclusive use, but also to boreal owls, dwarf marsh violets, black storks, gray wolves, snakes (as we have witnessed), the world's only population of Agrilus pseudocyaneus, around two hundred types of moss, two hundred eighty-three kinds of lichens, and over eighteen hundred fungal species, of which nine hundred forty-three are classified as being at risk. Of which two hundred can be found nowhere else in Poland. I am saying that there are two hundred different kinds of fungi here in Białowieża that are, everywhere else, probably already extinct.”

ForestPolandFungiFlora And FaunaRare Species
Book:The Extinction of Irena Rey
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“If certain bacteria, fungi, or algae inch across something made of copper, they absorb copper atoms, which disrupt their metabolism (human cells are unaffected). The microbes choke and die after a few hours.”

BacteriaCopperMicrobesFungiAlgaeAntimicrobial
Book:The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements
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“These truffles were a different thing altogether from the summer truffle he and Benedetta had found earlier in the year. Pale in color and as large as potatoes, they were both awesomely pungent and deeply intoxicating. Gusta and Benedetta threw them into every dish as casually as if they were throwing in parsley, and after a while Bruno did the same. He would never forget the first time they cooked a wild boar with celery and truffles: the dark, almost rank meat and the sulfuric reek of the tuber combined to form a taste that made him shiver. He was aware that Benedetta was deliberately cooking dishes designed to bind him to her. As well as the truffles, there was robiola del bec, a cheese made from the milk of a pregnant ewe, rich in pheromones. There were fiery little diavolilli, strong chile peppers that had been left to dry in the sun. Plates of fried funghi included morsels of Amanita, the ambrosia of the gods, said to be a natural narcotic. He didn't mind. He was doing the same to her: offering her unusual gelati flavored with saffron, the delicate pollen of the crocus flower; elaborate tarts of myrtle and chocolate; salads made with lichens and even acorns from her beloved woods. It was a game they played, based on their intimate appreciation of the taste of each other's bodies, so that the food and the sex became one harmonious whole, and it became impossible to say where eating ended and lovemaking began.”

AphrodisiacFungiTrufflesFood And Sex
Book:The Food of Love
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“Had I taken my title from the kingdom of fungi, I would have opted not for some unspectacular parasite, but rather the reishi, or Amanita virosa, or maybe the magnificent split gill, a mushroom found on every continent except Antarctica, where lichens reign. (For more on this please see Irena Rey's Kernel of Light, in my translation.) This is the least this author could have done. For the split gill can be 23,328 different sexes, each of which is able to mate with any of the 23,327 that it is not.”

FungiNumerousMushroomGenders
Book:The Extinction of Irena Rey
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“We inherit every one of our genes, but we leave the womb without a single microbe. As we pass through our mother's birth canal, we begin to attract entire colonies of bacteria. By the time a child can crawl, he has been blanketed by an enormous, unseen cloud of microorganisms--a hundred trillion or more. They are bacteria, mostly, but also viruses and fungi (including a variety of yeasts), and they come at us from all directions: other people, food, furniture, clothing, cars, buildings, trees, pets, even the air we breathe. They congregate in our digestive systems and our mouths, fill the space between our teeth, cover our skin, and line our throats. We are inhabited by as many as ten thousand bacterial species; those cells outnumber those which we consider our own by ten to one, and weigh, all told, about three pounds--the same as our brain. Together, they are referred to as our microbiome--and they play such a crucial role in our lives that scientists like [Martin J.] Blaser have begun to reconsider what it means to be human.”

VirusesBacteriaMicrobesFungiMicroorganismsMicrobiome
Author:Michael Specter
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“I have tried to find ways to enjoy the ambiguities that fungi present, but it's not always easy to be comfortable in the space created by open questions. Agoraphobia can set in. It's tempting to hide in small rooms built from quick answers. I have done my best to hold back. page 14”

ScienceFungiAs In Fungi As In Life
Book:Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures
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“Contrary to what you may assume, I am not a pessimist but an indifferentist- that is, I don't make the mistake of thinking that the... cosmos... gives a damn one way or the the other about the especial wants and ultimate welfare of mosquitoes, rats, lice, dogs, men, horses, pterodactyls, trees, fungi, dodos, or other forms of biological energy.”

ThinkingMenWayWantGivingMayFormEnergyMistakeTreeDogUltimateHorseAssumingContraryOne WayWelfareDamnCosmosRatsPessimistMosquitoesFungiLice
Author:H. P. Lovecraft
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“Imagine some foul and putrid corpse that has lain rotting and decomposing in the grave, a jelly-like mass of liquid corruption. Imagine such a corpse a prey to flames, devoured by the fire of burning brimstone and giving off dense choking fumes of nauseous loathsome decomposition. And then imagine this sickening stench, multiplied a millionfold and a millionfold again from the millions upon millions of fetid carcasses massed together in the reeking darkness, a huge and rotting human fungus. Imagine all this, and you will have some idea of the horror of the stench of hell.”

GivingHumansIdeasTogetherMillionsDarknessHellFireImagineHugeHorrorMassCorruptionGravesBurningFlamesPreyCorpsesChokeFoulLiquidDenseRottingJellyFungiDecomposition
Book:A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
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“Pessimists are just as illogical as optimists; insomuch as both envisage the aims of mankind as unified, and as having a direct relationship (either of frustration or of fulfilment) to the inevitable flow of terrestrial motivation and events. That is - both schools retain in a vestigial way the primitive concept of a conscious teleology - of a cosmos which gives a damn one way or the other about the especial wants and ultimate welfare of mosquitos, rats, lice, dogs, men, horses, pterodactyls, trees, fungi, dodos, or other forms of biological energy.”

MenWayWantGivingSchoolFormMotivationEnergyTreeMankindDogEventsConsciousConceptsFlowDirectUltimateHorseAimOne WayInevitableWelfareDamnFrustrationCosmosPrimitiveRatsOptimistPessimistUnifiedFulfilmentIllogicalFungiLice
Author:H. P. Lovecraft
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“So there you have it: Nature is a rotten mess. But that's only the beginning. If you take your eyes off it for one second, it will kill you. Thorns, insects, fungus, worms, birds, reptiles, wild animals, raging rivers, bottomless ravines, dry deserts, snow, quicksand, tumbleweeds, sap, and mud. Rot, poison and death. That's Nature.It's a wonder you even step outside of your cabin, I said.My bravery exceeds my good sense, he said.”

IfsSaidEyeAnimalWonderStepsBirdRiversBraveryRageSnowMessDesertPoisonDryMudWormsInsectsExceedRottenThornsGood SenseSapWild AnimalCabinsReptilesFungiQuicksandTumbleweeds
Book:Mr. Monk in Trouble
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“Most guys believe that they're supposed to know how to fix things. This is a responsibility that guys have historically taken upon themselves to compensate for the fact that they never clean the bathroom. A guy can walk into a bathroom containing a colony of commode fungus so advanced that it is registered to vote, but the guy would never dream of cleaning it, because he has to keep himself rested in case a Mechanical Emergency breaks out.”

KnowsBelieveFactsDreamGuyWalksResponsibilityBreakCasesKnow HowTakenVoteCleanCleaningBathroomEmergenciesThat GuyColonyBreak OutContainingFungi
Book:The World According to Dave Barry
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“The fungi became, or is for some mysterious reason still to be discovered, a pipeline into a mind, an entelechy, which we can only image as feminine and can only associate somehow to the environment, to the ecosystem. This is the Gaian mind. This is what the goddess really is. The goddess is a network of connective intelligence that is operating on this planet.”

MindStillsReasonEnvironmentPlanetsMysteriousFeminineGoddessAssociatesEcosystemsPipelineFungi
Author:Terence McKenna
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“At least that's what his note said, along with a scathing reminder that dishes didn't wash themselves and the fungus in the bathroom was one day away from evolving into sentient life. I folded the note into an airplane and sailed it across the room. It ended up perched jauntily on top of the ancient television. It looked good there and I left it as a tribute to freedom-loving fungi everywhere.”

SaidLeftRoomsTelevisionOne DayNotesAncientEvolveAirplaneDishesBathroomRemindersTributeFungi
Book:Nightlife
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“Another thing cooking is, or can be, is a way to honor the things we're eating, the animals and plants and fungi that have been sacrificed to gratify our needs and desires, as well as the places and the people that produced them. Cooks have their ways of saying grace too... Cooking something thoughtfully is a way to celebrate both that species and our relation to it.”

PeopleWayNeedsWellsHas BeensDesireAnimalGraceHonorEatingRelationCookingPlantSpeciesCelebrateCooksFungi
Author:Michael Pollan
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