The Botany of Desire (2001) (edit title/settings)

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Quotes edit see section history

• “Design in nature is but a concatenation of accidents, culled by natural selection until the result is so beautiful or effective as to seem a miracle of purpose.”

• “Psychiatrists regard a patient’s indifference to flowers as a symptom of clinical depression.”

• “Apples were something people drank ... Johnny Appleseed was bringing the gift of alcohol to the frontier.”

• “Our grammar might teach us to divide the world into active subjects and passive objects, but in a coevolutionary relationship every subject is also an object, every object a subject. That’s why it makes just as much sense to think of agriculture as something the grasses did to people as a way to conquer the trees”

• “Johnny Appleseed was no Christian saint—that left out too much of who he was, what he stood for in our mythology. Who he was, I realized, was the American Dionysus.”

• “It's only been in modern times, after industrial civilization concluded some what prematurely that nature's powers were no longer any match for its own that our gardens became binine, sunny and environmentally correct places from which the old horticultural dangers and temptations were expelled.”

• “the old testament and the criminal code both make a connection between forbidden plants, and knowledge”

• “design in nature is but a concatenation of accidents culled by natural selection until the result is so beautiful or effective as to seem a miracle of purpose”

• “science cannot create a new gene or recreate one that has been lost”

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• Design in nature is but a concatenation of accidents, culled by natural selection until the result is so beautiful or effective as to seem a miracle of purpose.

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• Psychiatrists regard a patient’s indifference to flowers as a symptom of clinical depression.

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• These ingredients would be combined in a hempseed-oil-based “flying ointment” that the witches would then administer vaginally using a special dildo. This was the “broomstick” by which these women were said to travel.

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• Howlett speculated that the human cannabinoid system evolved to help us endure (and selectively forget) the routine slings and arrows of life “so that we can get up in the morning and do it all over again.” It is the brain’s own drug for coping with the human condition.

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• Apples were something people drank. The reason people in Brilliant wanted John Chapman to stay and plant a nursery was the same reason he would soon be welcome in every cabin in Ohio: Johnny Appleseed was bringing the gift of alcohol to the frontier.

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• With flowers came fruit and seeds, and these, too, remade life on Earth. By producing sugars and proteins to entice animals to disperse their seed, the angiosperms multiplied the world’s supply of food energy, making possible the rise of large warm-blooded mammals. Without flowers, the reptiles, which had gotten along fine in a leafy, fruitless world, would probably still rule. Without flowers, we would not be.

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• “In wildness is the preservation of the world,” Thoreau once wrote; a century later, when many of the wild places are no more, Wendell Berry has proposed this necessary corollary: “In human culture is the preservation of wildness.”

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• Memory is the enemy of wonder, which abides nowhere else but in the present. This is why, unless you are a child, wonder depends on forgetting—on a process, that is, of subtraction. Ordinarily we think of drug experiences as additive—it’s often said that drugs “distort” normal perceptions and augment the data of the senses (adding hallucinations, say), but it may be that the very opposite is true—that they work by subtracting some of the filters that consciousness normally interposes between us and the world.

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• Our grammar might teach us to divide the world into active subjects and passive objects, but in a coevolutionary relationship every subject is also an object, every object a subject. That’s why it makes just as much sense to think of agriculture as something the grasses did to people as a way to conquer the trees.

  Highlighted by 27 Kindle customers

• Johnny Appleseed was no Christian saint—that left out too much of who he was, what he stood for in our mythology. Who he was, I realized, was the American Dionysus.

  Highlighted by 27 Kindle customers

Organizations edit see section history

• Monsanto: Produces genetically modified crops for farmers

First Sentence edit see section history

Table of Contents edit see section history

Authors & Contributors edit see section history

1. Michael Pollan (Author)

First Edition edit see section history

Classification edit see section history

• Library of Congress: Add the Library of Congress Classification.
• Dewey: 306.45

Subjects edit see section history

• Books › Professional & Technical › Professional Science › Biological Sciences › Botany
• Books › Outdoors & Nature › Environment › Ecology
• Books › Science › Biological Sciences › Plants
• Books › Science › Biological Sciences › Botany
• Books › Outdoors & Nature › Reference
• Books › Home & Garden › Gardening & Horticulture

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