Fungus Is Quotes & Sayings

A word about Hope House: there are places in the world where so many desperate people have lived and so many bad things have happened that the places themselves have become desperately bad. They're damp and weird and smell like foot fungus. The windows are never clean, and the linoleum curls up at the edges because it can't stand the floor. Every corner is sprayed with cobwebs and quivering shadows. When you walk into those bad places, you can feel a headache brewing between your eyebrows, a churning in your gut, a cold prickle at the back of your neck. You feel sad and angry and helpless, all at the same time. These bad places seem to hate you but, they also seem to want to keep you there very very much. — Laura Ruby

Marriage is a custom brought about by women who then proceed to live off men and destroy them, completely enveloping the man in a destructive cocoon or eating him away like a poisonous fungus on a tree. — Richard Harris

It is indeed my opinion now that evil is never "radical," that it is only extreme, and that it possess neither depth nor any demonic dimension. It can overgrow and lay waste the whole world precisely because it spreads like fungus on the surface. It is "thought-defying," as I said, because thought tries to reach some depth, to go to the roots, and the moment it concerns itself with evil, it is frustrated because there is nothing. That is its "banality." Only the good has depth and can be radical. — Hannah Arendt

Who are you, who is so wise in the way of alien fungus? — John Scalzi

Out of damp and gloomy days, out of solitude, out of loveless words directed at us, conclusions grow up in us like fungus: one morning they are there, we know not how, and they gaze upon us, morose and gray. Woe to the thinker who is not the gardener but only the soil of the plants that grow in him. — Friedrich Nietzsche

I've got a huge, terrible problem."
Oh no! Not that horrible toenail fungus that takes six months to cure?"
No, no, no. Much worse. This is shocking news. Are you sure I should tell you while you're driving?"
I've got my headset on. Both hands on the wheel. Windows rolled up. Go for it."
Okay, here goes ... Principal Abernethy called me this morning to let me know I'm in the running for valedictorian."
There is silence.
A rather loudish snort.
And guffaws.
Congratulations," she finally says, laughing. "What ever are you going to do?"
Fail ever assignment from today onward."
You won't be able to."
Watch me. — Lisa McMann

Tunnel vision is caused by an optic fungus that multiplies when the brain is less energetic than the ego. It is complicated by exposure to politics. — Tom Robbins

It is a thorough process, this war with the wilderness - breaking nature, taming the soil. feeding it on oats. The civilized man regards the pine tree as his enemy. He will fell it and let in the light, grub it up and raise wheat or rye there. It is no better than a fungus to him. — Henry David Thoreau

One grave in every graveyard belongs to the ghouls. Wander any graveyard long enough and you will find it - water stained and bulging, with cracked or broken stone, scraggly grass or rank weeds about it, and a feeling, when you reach it, of abandonment. It may be colder than the other gravestones, too, and the name on the stone is all too often impossible to read. If there is a statue on the grave it will be headless or so scabbed with fungus and lichens as to look like fungus itself. If one grave in a graveyard looks like a target for petty vandals, that is the ghoul-gate. If the grave wants to make you be somewhere else, that is the ghoul-gate. — Neil Gaiman

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

Bureaucracy is like a fungus that contaminates everything. — Jaime Lerner

A truly good book is something as wildly natural and primitive, mysterious and marvelous, ambrosial and fertile as a fungus or a lichen. — Henry David Thoreau

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. — Lee Goldberg

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

You may think a mushroom is a fungus. This is exactly like believing that a penis is a man. — Hope Jahren

I came to realize that no thing on Earth can properly be considered a single entity, but I am and you are composed of multiple life-forms, from different kingdoms of life, all working in concert to be me or you. And every bird (and the tree it lives in) is an ecosystem that participates in an ecosystem that eventually scales up to the planet. This notion has totally upended my idea of what an individual is, be it plant or animal or fungus, or person or place. In light of the new science, the singular noun "I" is obsolete because in reality, "I" is a community. — Eugenia Bone

Racism and inequality are likened to a fungus which grows in dark places and is all the more poisonous because one cannot see it. — Michael R. French

Good can be radical; evil can never be radical, it can only be extreme, for it possesses neither depth nor any demonic dimension yet--and this is its horror!--it can spread like a fungus over the surface of the earth and lay waste the entire world. Evil comes from a failure to think. It defies thought for as soon as thought tries to engage itself with evil and examine the premises and principles from which it originates, it is frustrated because it find nothing there. That is the banality of evil. — Amos Elon

Love is one of the two things worth dying for. I have yet to decide on the second. It is most certainly not colorful fungus. — Melissa Jensen

Your sense of humor is not for everyone, but I have to say it's growing on me. Like an out-of-control fungus. — Shelly Laurenston

Our world is falling apart quietly. Human civilization has reduced the plant, a four-million-year-old life form, into three things: food, medicine, and wood. In our relentless and ever-intensifying obsession with obtaining a higher volume, potency, and variety of these three things, we have devastated plant ecology to an extent that millions of years of natural disaster could not. Roads have grow like a manic fungus and the endless miles of ditches that bracket these roads serve as hasty graves for perhaps millions of plant species extinguished in the name of progress. Planet Earth is nearly a Dr. Seuss book made real: every year since 1990 we have created more than eight billion new stumps. If we continue to fell healthy trees at this rate, less then six hundred years from now, every tree on the planet will have been reduced to a stump. My job is about making sure there will be some evidence that someone cared about the great tragedy that unfolded during our age. — Hope Jahren

What does she even eat, do you think?"
"Tea fungus,"Ruth says. "Unsweetened. From an eye dropper. Is what I picture. either that or some sort of sea vegetable."
"Sad," I say.
"It is," Ruth muses.
We decide to order two skim milk cappuccinos and split a gluten-free carrot cake cupcake. — Mona Awad

Of course, a good meal might have helped; but I had already abolished my hunger by eating chocolate cake with fungus icing. Or I could have gone to a movie and smoked some grass. But when you're in that kind of sweat, the only lasting remedy is to ride with it: accept the anxiety, be depressed, relax, and let the current carry you where it will. — Truman Capote

We must learn that any person who will not accept what he knows to be truth for the very love of truth alone is very definitely undermining his mental integrity ... you have not been a close observer of such men if you have not seen them shrivel, become commonplace, mean without influence, without friends, and without the enthusiasm of youth and growth, like a tree covered with fungus, the foliage deceased, the life gone out of the heart with dry rot and indelibly marked for destruction
dead, but not yet handed over to the undertaker. — Luther Burbank

Not being ambitious of martyrdom, even in the cause of gastronomical enterprise, especially if the instrument is to be a contemptible, rank-smelling fungus, I never eat or cook mushrooms. — Mary Virginia Terhune

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. — Dave Barry

A peculiar fact about termite-tapeworm-fungus-moss art is that it goes always forward, eating its own boundaries, and, likely as not, leaves nothing in its path other than the signs of eager, industrious, unkempt activity. — Manny Farber

Want is a thing that unfurls unbidden like fungus, opening large upon itself, stopless, filling the sky.
But needs, from one day to the next, are few enough to fit in a bucket, with room enough left to rattle like brittle brush in a dry wind. — Barbara Kingsolver

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

The miracle of yeast is awesome enough to strain credulity. It's a fungus, a naturally occurring nanotechnological machine that converts sugar to the alcohol we drink. It breeds pretty much everywhere and is one of the organisms on which scientists have built much of our knowledge of how life works . . . and, postscript, it also makes possible the baking of bread. — Adam Rogers

Lion's mane may be our first 'smart' mushroom. It is a safe, edible fungus that appears to confer cognitive benefits on our aging population. — Paul Stamets

Miss you so much it hurts.

Seconds later, she texts back, The feeling is mushrooms,followed by a second text reading, Yes, autocorrect, I meant to say mushrooms, not mutual. Good catch.

Life without you does feel a little bit like fungus, I reply. But definitely less tasty. — Emily Henry

There is a particularly unattractive and discouragingly common affliction called tunnel vision, which for all the misery it causes, ought to top the job list at the World Health Organization. Tunnel vision is a disease in which perception is restricted by ignorance and distorted by vested interest. Tunnel vision is caused by an optic fungus that multiplies when the brain is less energetic than the ego. It is complicated by exposure to politics. When a good dea is run through the filters and compressors of ordinary tunnel vision, it not only comps out reduced in scale and value but in its new dogmatic configuration produces effects the opposite of those for which it originally was intended. — Tom Robbins

One weekend it rained for 48 hours without stopping. The rain beat like bony fingers against the window panes. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Fungus was growing on the walls. I polished off a bottle of gin sitting huddled over the two-bar electric fire and wrote a poem, one of the few that has lasted through the moves and the years. It is called 'Where Can I Go?'
If this is not the place where tears are understood where do I go to cry?
If this is not the place where my spirits can take wing where do I go to fly?
If this is not the place where my feelings can be heard where do I go to speak?
If this is not the place where you'll accept me as I am where can I go to be me?
If this is not the place where I can try and learn and grow where can I go to laugh and cry? — Alice Jamieson

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

Why are they together, the tree and the fungus? We don't know. The fungus could certainly live very well alone almost anywhere, but it chooses to entwine itself with the tree over an easier and more independent life. It has adapted to seek the rush of pure sweetness that comes directly from a plant root, such a strange and concentrated compound, unlike anything to be found elsewhere in the forest. And perhaps the fungus can somehow sense that when it is part of a symbiosis, it is also not alone. — Hope Jahren

Shall we go to Paris next spring? You will certainly be well by then. I agree that Dr. Tapper is far more intelligent and sensible than many of his profession. If he tells you that you are not to be slogging through the Wissahickon in this weather, you must deisit with your daily slog. Your lungs are fragile, my love. I would not have you expiring for a sight of interesting lichen. Love is one of two things worth dying for.I have yet to decide on the second.It is most certainly not colorful fungus.
I shall be home as soon as this business is settled, certainly no more than a week.My mother complains that you will not have her to dinner. Good for you. Take pity on Hamilton's new wife and have her to tea.Fire the cook, please.I cannot face another dish of sweetbreads.
With all my love always,
Edward — Melissa Jensen

In biology, fungus is a kingdom unto itself, a documented land of rot and decay, a place for yeasts and molds and spores and every manner of thing that grows in the dark, a fairy tale gone wrong. — A.S.A Harrison

The vice-president of an advertising agency is a bit of executive fungus that forms on a desk that has been exposed to conference. — Fred Allen

Wednesday is pizza day at Chadham High. The lunchroom smells like a cross between a sewer and a dead skunk. Chadham High pizza consists of a cardboard crust and sauce made of mud, topped with some kind of fungus that looks suspiciously like phlegm pretending to be cheese. — Huston Piner

The mountain pine beetle is a tiny creature that chews through a lodgepole's bark, gouges out a hollow in the wood and lays its eggs. The larvae hatch hungry and feed on the cambium layer, a tree's most vital part, the annual layer of cells that makes up a growth ring. To prevent drowning in the tree's sap, the beetle larvae can eject a choking fungus that not only halts the life-giving flow of sap, but stains the wood a grey-blue color. — Annie Proulx

Is there a fungus that speaks to you? I'm serious. People hear things. They hear God.
He meant it. He was serious. He wanted to mean it, to hear anything the man might say, the whole
shapeless narrative of his unraveling. — Don DeLillo

That's how it is, Rocamadour: in Paris we're like fungus, we grow on the railings of staircases, in dark rooms with greasy smells, where people make love all the time and then fry some eggs and put on Vivaldi records, light cigarettes ... and outside there are all sorts of things, the windows open onto the air and it all begins with a sparrow or a gutter, it rains a lot here, rocamadour, much more than in the country, and things get rusty ... we don't have many clothes, we get along with so few, a good overcoat, some shoes to keep the rain out, we're very dirty, everybody is dirty and good-looking in Paris, Rocamadour, the beds smell of night and deep sleep, dust and books underneath. — Julio Cortazar

Wine is one of the most complex of all beverages: the fruit of a soil, climate, and vintage, digested by a fungus through a process guided by the culture, vision, and skill of an individual man or woman. — Neel Burton

The average vice-president is a form of executive fungus that attaches itself to a desk. On a boat this growth would be called a barnacle. — Fred Allen