Amy Stewart Quotes

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.

Gardeners are the ultimate mixologists.

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.

A woman should have the right to do any sort of work she wants to, provided she can do it.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

Yes, well, he's a man of limited intellect, and if he had more than one idea at a time they'd die from overcrowding.