Quotes & Sayings About Fungi

There are places in New York where the city's anarchic, unaccommodating spirit, its fundamental, irrepressible aimlessness and heedlessness have found especially firm footholds. Certain transfers between subway lines, passageways of almost transcendent sordidness; certain sites of torn-down buildings where parking lots have silently sprung up like fungi; certain intersections created by illogical confluences of streets
these express with particular force the city's penchant for the provisional and its resistance to permanence, order, closure. — Janet Malcolm

On older trees still than these huge lobes of fungi grew like lungs. Here, as everywhere, the Unfulfilled Intention, which makes life what it is, was as obvious as it could be among the depraved crowds of a city slum. The leaf was deformed ... the taper was interrupted..and the ivy slowly strangled to death the promising sapling. — Thomas Hardy

Meggie looked up at the dense thicket of branches. She had never set eyes on a tree like it before. The bark was reddish brown, but as rough as the bark of an oak, and the trunk did not branch until high up in the tree, although it had so many bulges that you could find footholds and handholds everywhere. In some places huge tree fungi formed platforms. Hollows gaped in the towering trunk, and crevices full of feathers showed that human beings were not the only creatures to have nested in this tree. — Cornelia Funke

The soil is, as a matter of fact, full of live organisms. It is essential to conceive of it as something pulsating with life, not as a dead or inert mass. There could be no greater misconception than to regard the earth as dead: a handful of soil is teeming with life. The living fungi, bacteria, and protozoa, invisibly present in the soil complex, are known as the soil population. This population of millions and millions of minute existences, quite invisible to our eyes of course, pursue their own lives. They come into being, grow, work, and die: they sometimes fight each other, win victories, or perish; for they are divided into groups and families fitted to exist under all sorts of conditions. The state of a soil will change with the victories won or the losses sustained; and in one or other soil, or at one or other moment, different groups will predominate. — Albert Howard

What we call the xenosphere, the psychic link that you are all able to exploit, is made up of strands of alien fungi-like filaments and neurotransmitters. We call the xenoform ascomycetes xenosphericus. It is everywhere, in every environment on Earth. These delicate filaments are too small for the naked eye to see, and they are fragile, but they form multiple links with the natural fungi on human skin. They have an affinity for nerve endings and quickly access the central nervous system. Everybody linked to this network of xenoforms, this xenosphere is uploading information constantly, passively, without knowing. There is a global store of information in the very atmosphere, a worldmind, which only people like you can access. — Tade Thompson

Humans are omnivores, which means we are adapted to eat plants, fungi, and animals. The nutrients in the plant foods we consume depend on the genetics of the individual species, the quality of the soil they are grown in, and the weather conditions during that time. For animal foods, nutrient levels are dependent on what the animals eat throughout their lives and are also affected by their stress and hormone levels. Any toxins or environmental pollutants that the animals and plants are subjected to have the power to impact human health as well. — Darya Pino Rose

Mycologists are few and far between. We are under-funded, poorly represented in the context of other sciences - ironic, as the very foundation of our ecosystems are directly dependent upon fungi, which ultimately create the foundation of soils. — Paul Stamets

The world depends on fungi, because they are major players in the cycling of materials and energy around the world. — E. O. Wilson

Most of what presents itself to us in the marketplace as a product is in truth a web of relationships, between people, yes, but also between ourselves and all the other species on which we still depend. Eating and drinking especially implicate us in the natural world in ways that the industrial economy, with its long and illegible supply chains, would have us forget. The beer in that bottle, I'm reminded as soon as I brew it myself, ultimately comes not from a factory but from nature - from a field of barley snapping in the wind, from a hops vine clambering over a trellis, from a host of invisible microbes feasting on sugars. It took the carefully orchestrated collaboration of three far-flung taxonomic kingdoms - plants, animals, and fungi - to produce that ale. To make it yourself once in a while, to handle the barley and inhale the aroma of hops and yeast, becomes, among other things, a form of observance, a weekend ritual of remembrance. — Michael Pollan

Biological warfare (BW) and chemical warfare (CW) research was run out of Edgeware Arsenal but also involved testing in many other locations including Dugway Proving Ground, Utah. As in the radiation experiments described in an earlier chapter, BW/CW research involved releasing bacteria, fungi and viruses into general population areas. The bacterium Serratia marascens was released in many locations including New York (June 7-10, 1966), San Francisco (September, 1950), and Pennsylvania State Highway #16 westward for one mile from Benchmark #193 (January 7, 1955). Other infectious agents released into civilian populations included Aspergillus fumigatus and Bacillus globigii. — Colin A. Ross

Our ancestors went to the woods to find fuel; they set snares there for birds and gathered nuts and fungi. — John Burnside

We are not at the end of a rope, as it's so easy to think. Humanity can yet choose to turn direction. The moment has come to leap into action with glad hearts. The seeds are germinating. The fungi are willing. And we must be, too. — Michael Phillips

Smuts are parasitic fungi that are often spread by pollinators and so, in the case of campions, pollinators pose the double threat of both laying eggs that will hatch into voracious larvae and giving the flower a nasty dose of the clap. — Dave Goulson

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. — Rob Thurman

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 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. — H.P. Lovecraft

A mushroom walks into a bar. The bartender says, "We don't serve vegetables!" The mushroom responds, "But I'm a fungi!" *** — Various

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. — Tim Flannery

One of the really remarkably beneficial aspects of genetic engineering is that much of the previous methodology for controlling pests and so forth is through chemicals that affect a very broad spectrum of insects, for example, or fungicides that control fungi. — Nina Fedoroff

I thought a forest was made up entirely of trees, but now I know that the foundation lies below ground, in the fungi. — Derrick Jensen

Fungi are the grand recyclers of the planet and the vanguard species in habitat restoration. — Paul Stamets

A critic is to an author as a fungus to an oak. — Edward Abbey

We don't scare easy. We're Mycologists."
"Yes, Fungi makes you brave. — Girl Vs Monster

1. Insects and fungi are not the real cause of plant diseases but only attack unsuitable
varieties or crops imperfectly grown. Their true role is that of censors for pointing
out the crops that are improperly nourished and so keeping our agriculture up to the
mark. In other words, the pests must be looked upon as Nature's professors of
agriculture: as an integral portion of any rational system of farming.
2. The policy of protecting crops from pests by means of sprays, powders, and so
forth is unscientific and unsound as, even when successful, such procedure merely
preserves the unfit and obscures the real problem -- how to grow healthy crops." (An Agricultural Testament) — Albert Howard

Which is better: to have fun with fungi or to have Idiocy with ideology, to have wars because of words, to have tomorrow's misdeeds out of yesterday's miscreeds? — Aldous Huxley

Moving toward a more harmonious way of life and greater resilience requires our active participation. This means finding ways to become more aware of and connected to the other forms of life that are around us and that constitute our food -- plants and animals, as well as bacteria and fungi -- and to the resources, such as water, fuel, materials, tools, and transportation, upon which we depend. It means taking responsibility for our shit, both literally and figuratively. — Sandor Ellix Katz

Teeth represent only 10 percent of the surface of your mouth and bacteria live throughout the whole mouth. When you stop brushing, bacteria left behind resettle on your teeth and gums. Oil pulling reaches virtually 100 percent of the mouth, thereby affecting all bacteria, viruses, fungi, and protozoa in the mouth. — Bruce Fife

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. — Terence McKenna

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. — Michael Pollan

Mushrooms use a catapult powered by the acceleration of a tiny droplet of fluid over the spore surface to launch spores from their gills; a relative of mushrooms called the artillery fungus employs a snap-buckling device that resembles a miniature toilet plunger to propel a spore-filled capsule into the air, and cup fungi and other ascomycetes use microscopic squirt guns to blast their spores skyward. Most — Nicholas P. Money

Fungi are the interface organisms between life and death. — Paul Stamets

In effect, fungi do their digesting on the outside. While we tend to process our meals in the privacy of our own insides, fungi prefer to eat out. — L.G. Nicholas

If nature is left to itself, fertility increases. Organic remains of plants and animals accumulate and are decomposed on the surface by bacteria and fungi. With the movement of rainwater, the nutrients are taken deep into the soil to become food for microorganisms, earthworms, and other small animals. Plant roots reach to the lower soil strata and draw the nutrients back up to the surface. — Masanobu Fukuoka

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. — Sam Kean

To enter into a partnership with one of the many thousands of kinds of fungi, a tree must be very open-literally-because the fungal threads grow into its soft root hairs. There's no research into whether this is painful or not, but as it is something the tree wants, I imagine it gives rise to positive feelings. However the tree feels, from then on, the two partners work together. The fungus not only penetrates and envelops the tree's roots, but also allows its web to roam through the surrounding forest floor. In so doing, it extends the reach of the tree's own roots as the web grows out toward other trees. Here, it connects with other trees' fungal partners and roots. And so a network is created, and now it's easy for the trees to exchange vital nutrients (see chapter 3, "Social Security") and even information-such as an impending insect attack.

This connection makes fungi something like the forest Internet. — Peter Wohlleben

It's also hard for people to contend with the difficult possibility that we are simply overadvanced fungi and bacteria hurtling through a galaxy in cold, meaningless space. But just because our existence may have arisen unintentionally and without purpose doesn't preclude meaning or purpose from emerging as a result of our interaction and collaboration. Meaning may not be a precondition for humanity as much as a by-product of it. — Douglas Rushkoff

Ecological disturbance causes diseases to emerge. Shake a tree, and things fall out. Nearly all zoonotic diseases result from infection by one of six kinds of pathogen: viruses, bacteria, fungi, protists (a group of — David Quammen

I collect spores, molds, and fungus — Harold Ramis

His pretence to profound and obscure scholarship, his blundering ventures in stilted and laboured pseudo-humour, and his often vitriolic outbursts of critical prejudice must all be recognised and forgiven. Beyond and above them, and dwarfing them to insignificance, was a master's vision of the terror that stalks about and within us, and the worm that writhes and slavers in the hideously close abyss. Penetrating to every festering horror in the gaily painted mockery called existence, and in the solemn masquerade called human thought and feelings that vision had power to project itself in blackly magical crystallisations and transmutations; till there bloomed in the sterile America of the 'thirties and 'forties such a moon-nourished garden of gorgeous poison fungi as not even the nether slope of Saturn might boast. — H.P. Lovecraft

If a healthy soil is full of death, it is also full of life: worms, fungi, microorganisms of all kinds ... Given only the health of the soil, nothing that dies is dead for very long. — Wendell Berry

But the petty thought is like a fungus: it crawls and cringes and wants to be nowhere - until the whole body is rotten and withered with little fungi. — Friedrich Nietzsche

No matter how complex or affluent, human societies are nothing but subsystems of the biosphere, the Earth's thin veneer of life, which is ultimately run by bacteria, fungi and green plants. — Vaclav Smil

The perfume that her body exhaled was of the quality of that earth-flesh, fungi, which smells of captured dampness and yet is so dry, overcast with the odour of oil of amber, which is an inner malady of the sea, making her seem as if she had invaded a sleep incautious and entire. Her flesh was the texture of plant life, and beneath it one sensed a frame, broad, porous and sleep-worn, as if sleep were a decay fishing her beneath the visible surface. About her head there was an effulgence as of phosphorous glowing about the circumference of a body of water - as if her life lay through her in ungainly luminous deteriorations - the troubling structure of the born somnambule. — Djuna Barnes

Why did the mushroom go to the party?
Because he's a fungi! — One Direction

The proliferation of luminous fungi or iridescent crystals in deep caves where the torchlessly improvident hero needs to see is one of the most obvious intrusions of narrative causality into the physical universe. — Terry Pratchett

I'm obsessed with broccoli, carrots, celery, string beans, snap peas, black kale, brussels sprouts, cabbage - I could go on! They used to call me 'rabbit' when I was a kid. I hate mushrooms, though. I apologize to fungi lovers, but this way, there's more for you! — Lisa Edelstein

Never a cell biologist at heart, as a colleague recalled, he contaminated the cells, infected the cultures, and grew out balls of fungi in the petri dishes. — Siddhartha Mukherjee

But time in only another liar, so go along the wall a little further: if blackberries prove bitter there'll be mushrooms, fairy-ring mushrooms in the grass, sweetest of all fungi. — William Carlos Williams

An act as quotidian and practical as making your own sauerkraut represents nothing less than a way of engaging with the world. Or rather, with several different worlds, each nested inside the other: the invisible world of fungi and bacteria; the community in which you live; and the industrial food system that is undermining the health of our bodies and the land. — Michael Pollan

In the wild a plant and its pests are continually coevolving, in a dance of resistance and conquest that can have no ultimate victor. But coevolution ceases in an orchard of grafted trees, since they are genetically identical from generation to generation. The problem very simply is that the apple trees no longer reproduce sexually, as they do when they're grown from seed, and sex is nature's way of creating fresh genetic combinations. At the same time the viruses, bacteria, fungi, and insects keep very much at it, reproducing sexually and continuing to evolve until eventually they hit on the precise genetic combination that allows them to overcome whatever resistance the apples may have once possessed. Suddenly total victory is in the pests' sight - unless, that is, people come to the tree's rescue, wielding the tools of modern chemistry. — Michael Pollan

We can eat and digest everything from rancid mammary gland
secretions to fungi to rocks (or cheese, mushrooms, and salt if
you prefer euphemisms). — Marvin Harris

Evan ran his finger across the faded leather spines. He laughed at how silly some of the names were: Paint Your Roses Red, Edelweiss and Me, World of Mushrooms and Fungi, The Toadstool Diaries, Daffodils Unseen and Exotic Plants Unleashed, to name but a few. — H.B. Bolton

It was very sad under the trees. Although spring was well advanced, in the deep shade there was nothing but death-rotten leaves, gray and white fungi, and over everything a funeral hush. — Nathanael West

Whenever you leave cleared land, when you step from some place carved out, plowed, or traced by a human and pass into the woods, you must leave something of yourself behind. It is that sudden loss, I think, even more than the difficulty of walking through undergrowth, that keeps people firmly fixed to paths. In the woods, there is no right way to go, of course, no trail to follow but the law of growth. You must leave behind the notion that things are right. Just look around you. Here is the way things are. Twisted, fallen, split at the root. What grows best does so at the expense of what's beneath. A white birch feeds on the pulp of an old hemlock and supports the grapevine that will slowly throttle it. In the dead wood of another tree grow fungi black as devil's hooves. Overhead the canopy, tall pines that whistle and shudder and choke off light from their own lower branches. (from "Revival Road") — Louise Erdrich

I'm saying that mushrooms are very clever at surveying a landscape and taking a long-term view of the health of the population of the descendent organisms that give rise to the forest, that create the debris fields, that feed the fungi, that help the fungi's own progeny live downstream. They take a very advanced view of ecosystem health and management, trying to increase soil depth, and, by increasing soil depth and the richness of the soil, to increase the carrying capacity of the ecosystem. Higher carrying capacity leads to more biodiversity, more sustainability, more resiliency. — Derrick Jensen

Nature doth thus kindly heal every wound. By the mediation of a thousand little mosses and fungi, the most unsightly objects become radiant of beauty. There seem to be two sides of this world, presented us at different times, as we see things in growth or dissolution, in life or death. And seen with the eye of the poet, as God sees them, all things are alive and beautiful. — Henry David Thoreau

Ants are so much like human beings as to be an embarrassment. They farm fungi, raise aphids as livestock, launch armies into war, use chemical sprays to alarm and confuse enemies, capture slaves, engage in child labour, exchange information ceaselessly. They do everything but watch television. — Lewis Thomas

The difference is an objective phenomenon of soil science; what we call "soil" is a community of living, mostly microscopic organisms in a nutrient matrix. Organic farming, by definition, enhances the soil's living and nonliving components. Modern conventional farming is an efficient reduction of that process that adds back just a few crucial nutrients of the many that are removed each year when biomass is harvested ... Chemicals that sterilize the soil destroy organisms that fight plant diseases, aerate, and manufacture fertility. Recent research has discovered that just adding phosphorus (the P in all "NPK" fertilizers) kills the tiny filaments of fungi that help plants absorb nutrients. — Barbara Kingsolver

Billions of years ago exploding stars sent atoms hurtling through space and we've been recycling them on Earth ever since. Except for the occasional comet, meteor, some interstellar dust, we've used exactly the same atoms over and over since the earth was formed. We eat them, we drink them, we breathe them, we are made of them. At this precise moment each of us is exchanging our atoms with everyone else, and not just with each other, but with other animals, trees, fungi, moulds... — Nathan Filer

Over one hundred ninety species of ants have been found to grow a kind of fungi which they fertilize, plant, and even prune. Many of them also keep aphids the way we keep cows. They milk them to obtain their sweet honeydew and build shelters for them like barns. One kind of ant, the fierce Amazon, goes so far as to steal the larvae of other ants to keep as slaves. These slave ants build homes for and feed the Amazon ants, who are unable to do anything but fight. The soldier ants depend completely on the slave ants for survival. Without them, they would die. — Jenny Offill

I had always believed government was not a fungus: It could survive in sunshine. — Patricia Schroeder