Amy Stewart Quotes

#1. 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.

Amy Stewart

#2. Eternity can be found in the minuscule, in the place where earthworms, along with billions of unseen soil-dwelling microorganisms, engage in a complex and little-understood dance with the tangle of plant roots that make up their gardens, their cities.

Amy Stewart

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

Amy Stewart

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

Amy Stewart

#5. 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.

Amy Stewart

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

Amy Stewart

#7. Males approach with caution, first assessing whether the female has had anything to eat lately. If she looks well fed, the male has some hope of getting through the ordeal alive.

Amy Stewart

#8. 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.

Amy Stewart

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

Amy Stewart

#10. 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.

Amy Stewart

#11. 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.

Amy Stewart

#12. 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.

Amy Stewart

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

Amy Stewart

#14. 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.

Amy Stewart

#15. 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.

Amy Stewart

#16. Epigraph
"I got a revolver to protect us." said Miss Constance,
"and I soon had use for it."
--New York Times, June 3 1915

Amy Stewart

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

Amy Stewart

#18. Gardeners are the ultimate mixologists.

Amy Stewart