Explore the wonderful quotes under this tag
A sickly little smile grew and died on his mouth like a fungus.
Sep 10, 2025
I wouldn't say hate, exactly. You're kind of like fungus, Gwen. After a while, you just start growing on people.
I collect spores, molds, and fungus.
I thought a forest was made up entirely of trees, but now I know that the foundation lies below ground, in the fungi.
So soon as prudence has begun to grow up in the brain, like a dismal fungus, it finds its first expression in a paralysis of generous acts.
A truly good book is something as wildly natural and primitive, mysterious and marvelous, ambrosial and fertile as a fungus or a lichen.
"I'm hoping that the more you see me, the more I'll grow on you." "Like a fungus?
Truth grew in my mind like a fungus, and though I tried to sleep it out, there was no resisting the epiphanies.
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.
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.
Vietnam, we take over by doing pedicure! That's how we take over. We take over one foot at a time, damn it - that's the plan of attack right there. We take over from the toe up, that's the plan. We spread over USA like fungus from the toe.
The world depends on fungi, because they are major players in the cycling of materials and energy around the world.
The wrecks of slavery are fast growing a fungus crop of sentiment.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Your shower shoes have fungus on them. You'll never make it to the bigs with fungus on your shower shoes. Think classy, you'll be classy. If you win 20 in the show, you can let the fungus grow back and the press'll think you're colorful. Until you win 20 in the show, however, it means you are a slob.
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.
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.
At the time my dog had a fungus on her chest that wouldn't heal and resisted treatment. I made an ointment with our product and it cleared up in two days. She lived to 17 years.
...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.
Now when you cut a forest, an ancient forest in particular, you are not just removing a lot of big trees and a few birds fluttering around in the canopy. You are drastically imperiling a vast array of species within a few square miles of you. The number of these species may go to tens of thousands. Many of them are still unknown to science, and science has not yet discovered the key role undoubtedly played in the maintenance of that ecosystem, as in the case of fungi, microorganisms, and many of the insects.
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.
Bureaucracy is like a fungus that contaminates everything.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Fungi are the interface organisms between life and death.
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.
Sometimes I worry I'm not going to be the best parent because if my baby gets a skin fungus I might sell him at a garage sale.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Right-thinking people are not supposed to discuss any meteorological or geophysical event - a hurricane, a wildfire, a heat wave, a drought, a flood, a blizzard, a tornado, a lightning strike, an unfamiliar breeze, a strange tingling on the neck - without immediately invoking the climate crisis. It causes earthquakes, plagues and backyard gardening disappointments. Weird fungus on your tomato plants? Classic sign of global warming.
They carried the sky. The whole atmosphere, they carried it, the humidity, the monsoons, the stink of fungus and decay, all of it, they carried gravity.
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!
Ants are so much like human beings as to be an embarrasment...They do everything but watch television.
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.
I had always believed government was not a fungus: It could survive in sunshine.
Ants are so much like human beings as to be an embarrassment. They farm fungi, raise aphids as livestock, launch armies into wars, use chemical sprays to alarm and confuse enemies, capture slaves... They do everything but watch television.
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.
Lions mane may be our first smart mushroom. It is a safe, edible fungus that appears to confer cognitive benefits on our aging population.
...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.
The vice-president of an advertising agency is a bit of executive fungus that forms on a desk that has been exposed to conference.
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.
While conversion of sugars to ethanol is the predominant reaction, it is only one of potentially thousands of biochemical reactions taking place during fermentation. As a result, wine contains trace amounts of a large number of organic acids, esters, sugars, alcohols, and other molecules. Wine is, in fact, 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.