Fungi Quotes

“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, The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate: Discoveries from a Secret World

“All Fungi are edible.

Some fungi are only edible once.”
― Terry Pratchett

“The way fungi and mycorrhizae direct nutrients in biological ecosystems is a case study for how we can direct resources within human economic systems. And in doing this, we cultivate a multitude of business opportunities.”
― Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr, CEO of Mayflower-Plymouth

“At Mayflower-Plymouth, we are trying to mimic the intelligence of fungi and mycelium to add value in service to businesses.”
― Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr, CEO of Mayflower-Plymouth

“Fungi make worlds. They also unmake them. There are lots of ways to catch them in the act. When you cook mushroom soup, or just eat it. When you go out gathering mushrooms, or buy them. When you ferment alcohol, plant a plant, or just bury your hands in the soil; and whether you let a fungus into your mind, or marvel at the way that it might enter the mind of another. Whether you’re cured by a fungus, or watch it cure someone else; whether you build your home from fungi, or start growing mushrooms in your home, fungi will catch you in the act.
If you’re alive, they already have.”
― Merlin Sheldrake, Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures

“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?”
― Merlin Sheldrake, Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures

“Fungi broker resources between species via mycelium networks and in doing so they cultivate health and resilience for the entire ecosystem. In the same way, each business should cultivate health and resilience for the entire business ecosystem.”
― Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr

“Every part of business that involves the movement of resources can be improved by learning from fungi.”
― Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr, CEO of Mayflower-Plymouth

“When we start learning from and working with fungi, there will be no such thing as trash anymore. And there are so many business opportunities in that.”
― Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr

“Slime mold can teach us how to establish better supply chain networks.”
― Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr

“Everything we need to know about upcycling, we can learn from fungi.”
― Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr

“Managing waste is a really bad goal. Only an inefficient system would aim to manage waste. A better goal is making waste non-existent by designing the system itself, through it's participants, to continually upcycle resources.”
― Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr

“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.”
― Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr, CEO of Mayflower-Plymouth

“Fungi protect the ecosystem they inhabit through complex symbiotic relationships. We can design a system whereby businesses protect the business ecosystem through complex symbiohtic relationships.”
― Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr, CEO of Mayflower-Plymouth

“We don't scare easy. We're Mycologists."
"Yes, Fungi makes you brave.”
― Girl vs Monster

“Our ports wouldn't have backlogs if our supply chains, distribution systems and transportation systems mimicked fungal networks.”
― Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr, CEO of Mayflower-Plymouth

“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, The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements

“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”
― Merlin Sheldrake, Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures

“It was a fungal party hellscape.”
― Robin Sloan, Sourdough

“n the wake of catastrophes, fungal diversity helps restore devastated habitats. Evolutionary trends generally lead to increased bio-diversity. However, due to human activities we are losing many species before we can even identify them. In effect, as we lose species, we are experiencing devolution--turning back the clock on biodiversity, which is a slippery slope toward massive ecological collapse. The interconnectedness of life is an obvious truth that we ignore at our peril.”
― Paul Stamets

“If bacteria can be pictured as teeming black ants under the microscope, imagine fungi as gossamer spider webs. These organisms form long threads called hyphae that stretch between plant roots. Some form into even larger masses called mycelium that can span an entire backyard.”
― Amy Stewart, The Earth Moved: On the Remarkable Achievements of Earthworms

“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.”
― Peter Wohlleben, The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate: Discoveries from a Secret World

“The candy cap was a revelation to me: redolent with the smell of maple, marvelously silky and spongy in texture, earth and meaty and sweet. When you eat a candy cap, your skin smells like maple sugar. When you exercise after eating a candy cap, your sweat smells like maple sugar. When you make love after eating a candy cap . . . well, I leave that to your imagination, but . . . yes.”
― Eugenia Bone, Mycophilia: Revelations from the Weird World of Mushrooms

“This particular orchid gets all its energy from fungi, sometimes from different kinds of fungi simultaneously. It never even begins to turn to the sun. No photosynthesis here. It relies utterly on its underground friends: the unseen, unsung fungi. Forgive me if this is a romantic vision. Orchids seem to have that effect on people. But since finding out that they are essentially reliant on fungi, I have a new perspective. They are not lone, rising, random gifts, like treasure. They are weak and desperate, and they are gamblers, hoping their luck holds and a good strong friend can be found close by to give them everything they lack. What do the fungi get out of the deal? The relationship of the orchid to the fungus is described as myco-heterotrophic, with the plant sometimes viewed as a sort of parasite, taking the carbon it needs and giving nothing back. Perhaps there’s more we need to learn here, to understand it fully. But, for now, I’ll anthropomorphise and romanticise it further by maintaining that a fungus can make a really good friend, especially if you’re a rare, weak seed with no energy of your own.”
― Aliya Whiteley, The Secret Life of Fungi: Discoveries From A Hidden World

“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.”
― Anthony Capella, The Food of Love

“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.”
― Anthony Capella, The Food of Love

“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.”
― Jeff Lowenfels, Teaming with Microbes: A Gardener's Guide to the Soil Food Web

“Nor can our immune systems be taken as a measure of individuality, because they are as concerned with managing our relationships with resident microbes, as fighting off external attackers, and appear to have evolved to enable colonisation by microbes rather than prevent it. Where does this leave you? Or perhaps y'all?”
― SHELDRAKE MERLIN, Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures

“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.”
― Jennifer Croft, The Extinction of Irena Rey

“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.”
― Jennifer Croft, The Extinction of Irena Rey