Amy Stewart Quotes & Sayings

The science of fermentation is wonderfully simple. Yeast eat sugar. They leave behind two waste products, ethyl alcohol and carbon dioxide. If we were being honest, we would admit that what a liquor store sells is, chemically speaking, little more than the litter boxes of millions of domesticated yeast organisms, wrapped up in pretty bottles with fancy price tags. — Amy Stewart

Dogfish Head makes a cacao beer called Theobroma that is intended to be a modern recreation of an ancient Olmec recipe. Based on residue analysis of pottery dating to 1400 BC, plus some hints from the reports of Spanish explorers, their recipe includes honey; chili pepper; vanilla; and annatto, a reddish spice derived from the achiote tree, — Amy Stewart

Epigraph
"I got a revolver to protect us." said Miss Constance,
"and I soon had use for it."
--New York Times, June 3 1915 — Amy Stewart

I have come to understand, like Darwin had, that earthworms are not destroyers, but redeemers. They move through waste and decay in their contemplative way, sifting, turning it into something else, something that is better. — Amy Stewart

Young shoots contain enough cyanide to kill a horse. Death is mercifully swift, usually caused by cardiac arrest or respiratory failure and preceded by only a few hours of anxiety, convulsions, and staggering about. — Amy Stewart

Perhaps it makes sense that a creature that doesn't get ill and has few enemies among its neighbors would also live agelessly and die without explanation or cause
would simply vanish without a trace. — Amy Stewart

Some growers believe that a particular type of music makes the plants grow faster, but most agree that the best strategy for the plants is to play whatever music the workers like best. — Amy Stewart

Aconitine is so powerful that Nazi scientists found it useful as an ingredient for poisoned bullets. — Amy Stewart

I couldn't understand how anyone would take hold of a stranger and pour out their troubles. But now I realized that people did it all the time. They called for help. And some people would answer, out of a sense of duty and a sense of belonging to the world around them. — Amy Stewart

People here had redwood trees in their backyards. You were never far from the infinite. — Amy Stewart

Males approach with caution, first assessing whether the female has had anything to eat lately. If she looks well fed, the male has some hope of getting through the ordeal alive. — Amy Stewart

A poisonous seed will only kill you if you chew it and swallow. — Amy Stewart

Any environment, any single life is in a continuous state of change. This is just more obvious when you pay attention to earthworms. Their work may seem unspectacular at first. They don't chirp or sing, they don't gallop or soar, they don't hunt or make tools or write books. But they do something just as powerful: they consume, they transform, they change the earth. — Amy Stewart

The rat population thrived in such a horrible mess. Ironically, cats were believed to be the consorts of witches in those days, so they were killed. Persecution of cats during the Middle Ages nearly eliminated populations of the rat's natural predator, just when Europeans could have used the cats' hunting skills the most. — Amy Stewart

Eternity can be found in the minuscule, in the place where earthworms, along with billions of unseen soil-dwelling microorganisms, engage in a complex and little-understood dance with the tangle of plant roots that make up their gardens, their cities. — Amy Stewart

In 1897, a Scientific American reporter wrote that mezcal is described as tasting like a mixture of gasoline, gin and electricity. Tequila is even worse, and is said to incite murder, riot and revolution. — Amy Stewart

Gardeners are the ultimate mixologists. — Amy Stewart

But a male tree produces only small, well-behaved flowers - that is, if your definition of well behaved includes spewing plant sperm into the air for weeks on end. — Amy Stewart

the invention of beer. Picture a bucket of barley left to soak overnight to soften the tough outer husk. Wild yeast would have found its way into the bucket, and someone would have thought to taste the strange, foamy mixture that resulted from the yeast going to work on all those sugars. There it was: beer! Yeasty, bubbly, mildly intoxicating beer. The priorities of people in the waning years of the Stone Age must have undergone a rapid reshuffling as society organized itself around the need to reproduce this glorious mishap on a larger scale. — Amy Stewart

I'd always felt that one could read a woman's discontent in the amount of embroidery in her sitting room. It gave me a crowded and nervous feeling to sit among so much frantic stitchery. — Amy Stewart

They are near the bottom of the food chain - a meal for fish and birds - while humans eat from the top of the food chain, consuming an astonishing array of what lies on the planet. But eventually, even we become food for the worms. Shakespeare saw this connection, writing in Hamlet, "A man may fish with a worm that hath eat of a king, and eat of a fish that hath fed of that worm. — Amy Stewart

It looked like the kind of place where people were shot over the rent money. — Amy Stewart

But gardening is none of that, really. Strip away the gadgets and the techniques, the books and the magazines and the soil test kits, and what you're left with, at the end of the day, is this: a stretch of freshly turned dirt, a handful of seeds scratched into the surface, and a marker to remember where they went. It is at the same time an incredibly brave and an incredibly simple thing to do, entrusting your seeds to the earth and waiting for them to rise up out of the ground to meet you. — Amy Stewart

The male doesn't eat - it doesn't even have a mouth or an anus - so it does nothing but mate until death. — Amy Stewart

It didn't help that Norma had all the girlish charm of a boulder — Amy Stewart

I believe that answers your questions," Sheriff Heath said, returning to his seat.
A brawny Italian man in the back of the room said, "No, sir, I didn't get an answer to my question about marriage proposals."
I jumped up before Sheriff Heath could. These reporters needed to see that I could speak for myself. "The presence or absence of suitors in the lives of the Kopp sisters has no bearing on this matter," I told them, "and I see no men here today who would stand a chance with any one of us. — Amy Stewart

If you allow a creek to go back to being a creek, if you let the trees and the bramble get overgrown, and you let the stream overrun its banks whenever it wants to, the wetland will take care of itself. The water that trickles into the ocean will be clean and pristine if everything is just left alone to work the way it was designed to work. Earthworms have shown that they can take care of the soil in the same way that a wetland takes care of the water. Nature regenerates. It Cleans. It hides a multitude of sins. — Amy Stewart