“Everyone knows how to cook parasols—you soak them in milk, then dip them in egg and breadcrumbs and fry them until they're brown as chops. You can do the same thing with a panther amanita that smells of nuts, but people don't pick amanitas. They divide mushrooms into poisonous and edible, and the guidebooks discuss the features that allow you to tell the difference—as if there are good mushrooms and bad mushrooms. No mushroom book separates them into beautiful and ugly, fragrant and stinking, nice to touch and nasty, or those that induce sin and those that absolve it. People see what they want to see, and in the end they get what they want—clear, but false divisions. Meanwhile, in the world of mushrooms, nothing is certain.”

“The only good mushroom is a cooked mushroom.”

“Let me get this straight: You want to poison me nearly to death, put me out to the side of the road and then set me on fire, right?""...It sounded a lot better when we were out in the mushroom patch.""Those must have been SOME mushrooms!"--Reggie Sinclair and The Witches in Training from Angela's Coven.”

“The road climbs curving out of wet ground thick with cedars, and up onto a plateau meadow where Jersey cows, beautiful as deer, watching them with Juno eyes. Along the trail the ferns are dense, drooping with wet, twenty kinds of them. Again he does not know them (in my experience, ferns are an exclusively feminine expertise), and she tells him: hayscented fern, wood fern, sensitive fern, cinnamon fern, ostrich fern, interrupted fern, Christmas fern, bracken, maidenhair - names that are as pleasant to his ear as the woods smells are to his nose. In the intervals between clumps of spruce, the moss spreads a green carpet, inches thick, feather-soft, with candles of ground pine and the domes of spotted orange mushrooms rising out of it...Those aren't toadstools, Those are mushrooms. Deadly Amanita mushrooms. Ne mangez pas.You know everything that grows here. That's wonderful." Not so wonderful. I grew up here. I grew up in Sewickley, Pennsylvania, too, but I couldn't tell you the name of one thing that grows there. One, maybe Lilacs.You didn't grow up with my mother.”

“The Mushrooms. He rubbed himself with them and then whamo! Grumpy glows. He wouldn't come anywhere near this place without his mushroom rubdown, and let me tell you, that was disturbing to watch. The sounds he made, his face..." Leo shuddered. "He really needs to do that in private.”

“I wanted to paint a picture some day that people would stand before and forget that it was made of paint. I wanted it to creep into them like a bar of music and mushroom there like a soft bullet.”