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“Let me stay in the woods with you,' he said with a huff of breath.

I imagined it. Having him share tea with me and Mr. Fox. I could show him the places to pick the sweetest blackberries. We could eat burdock and red clover and parasol mushrooms. At night we would lie on our backs and whisper together. He would tell me about the constellations, about theories of magic, and the plots of television shows he'd seen while in the mortal world. I would tell him all the secret thoughts of my heart.

For a moment, it seemed possible.

But eventually they would come for him, the way that Lady Nore and Lord Jarel came for me. If he was lucky, it would be his sister's guards dragging him back to Elfhame. If he wasn't, it would be a knife in the dark from one of his enemies.

He did not belong here, sleeping in dirt. Scrabbling out an existence at the very edges of things.

'No,' I made myself tell him. 'Go home.'

I could see the hurt in his face. The honest confusion that came with unexpected pain.

'Why?' he asked, sounding so lost that I wanted to snatch back my words.

'When you found me tied to that stake, I thought about hurting you,' I told him, hating myself. 'You are not my friend.'

I do not want you here. Those are the words I ought to have said, but couldn't because they would be a lie.

'Ah,' he said. 'Well.'

I let out a breath. 'You can stay the night,' I blurted out, unable to resist the temptation. 'Tomorrow, you go home. If you don't, I'll use the last favour you owe me from our game to force you.

'What if I go and come back again? he asked, trying to mask his hurt.

'You won't.' When he got home, his sisters and his mother would be waiting. They would have worried when they couldn't find him. They'd make him promise never to do anything like that again. 'You have too much honour.”
― Holly Black, The Stolen Heir

“Do you wish to return to Cambridge, Em?" he said. "Because if that is the case, you need only say the word. I suppose I could return to teaching--- perhaps I could do both, or install a regent here, to rule in my stead. If there is one thing I will not stand for, it is for you to be unhappy---"
"No, indeed!" I exclaimed. He appeared to have worked himself up into a proper speech, so I put my hand over his mouth. And then-- my initial thought was that this would be more efficient than arguing with him--- I pulled his face to mine, and kissed him.
As I had guessed, he forgot all about what he had been saying, and pulled me closer. His lips tasted like the salt the servants had sprinkled onto the coffee--- quite agreeable. I stopped thinking, something I rarely do, and for a moment there was only the hum of crickets and rustling of night creatures in the trees.
He drew back and touched my cheek, his dark eyes searching mine. A flickering, moon-colored glow had appeared above us--- he had summoned a light.
"I mean it," he murmured. So not quite so forgetful, then. The light caught caught on the silvered flowers in his hair and made him look even more inconveniently otherworldly than he already did, but I found that when I focused on small, familiar things, like the way his mouth came up slightly higher on the left side, and how his green eyes leaned more yellow than blue, I was able to disregard this.
"I know," I replied. "I have brought myself here, Wendell--- I am not some poor maiden who stumbled unawares through a ring of mushrooms.”
― Heather Fawcett, Emily Wilde's Compendium of Lost Tales

“There are some pretty weird ones, though. There’s a guy here who is a mushroom. Why would you turn yourself into a mushroom? He looks like a penis. Like one of those weird ones that’s really wide and short. My boyfriend before my Barry had a dick like that. It smelled like mushrooms, too.”
― Matt Dinniman, The Dungeon Anarchist's Cookbook

“There are some pretty weird ones, though. There’s a guy here who is a mushroom. Why would you turn yourself into a mushroom? He looks like a penis.”
― Matt Dinniman, The Dungeon Anarchist's Cookbook

“NO GOOD DAY ever started with death before coffee.”
― Adrian M. Gibson, Mushroom Blues

“As you live with anything, I suspect. You bear it, or you end it. So far we have proved equal to bearing it."
With my mouth stuffed full of mushroom, I didn't say that you could also find beauty in it.”
― Nghi Vo, The Empress of Salt and Fortune

“The problem is that progress stopped making sense. More and more of us looked up one day and realized that the emperor had no clothes.”
― Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins

“In sum, you and I are the same. You may not admit it aloud, but I know you will read this book and wonder how your lover would taste sauteed with shallots and mushrooms and deglazed with a little red wine. You read, and you wonder, and you know the answer would be *delicious*.”
― Chelsea G. Summers, A Certain Hunger

“Why don’t we use these stories in how we know the world? One reason is that contaminated diversity is complicated, often ugly, and humbling. Contaminated diversity implicates survivors in histories of greed, violence, and environmental destruction.”
― Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins

“Prohibition had been good to Tijuana . . . . The number of saloons had doubled in the span of a few years. Gambling clubs mushroomed: Monte Carlo, the Tivoli Bar, the Foreign Club. Raunchy establishments mixed with others that promised a glimpse of "old Mexico," a false creation more romantic than any Hollywood film. But what did the tourists know? The Americans streamed into Mexico, ready to construct a new playground for themselves, to drink the booze that was forbidden in Los Angeles, San Diego, and San Francisco, but flowed abundantly across the border. Lady Temperance had no abode here.”
― Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Gods of Jade and Shadow

“You could, of course, start a campaign for the prevention of winter—gorge yourself on psychedelic mushrooms and act the shaman, beating drums and chanting spells—but it would make a lot more sense to sew fur coats and buy warm boots...”
― Arkady Strugatsky, The Snail on the Slope

“I traveled those book-walled corridors, bathed in the odor of yellowing paper and musty cloth bindings. I felt as if the London of Dickens and the Arab world of Burton and a thousand other worlds of a thousand other writers were here to be breathed in and assimilated almost without the necessity of reading, as if they were mushrooms that had thrown off pungent clouds of pollen which, on inhalation, fertilized the mind and the imagination. I longed to pluck a volume off a shelf and escape into its pages, for even the nightmare worlds of Lovecraft, Poe, or Bram Stoker would be more appealing than the real world in which we had to live.”
― Dean Koontz, Twilight Eyes: A Thriller

“The tracks of a fox raised out of the snow intaglio like little mushrooms and berrystains where birds shat crimson mutes upon the snow like blood.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Child of God

“Cords and rhizomorphs are a good reminder that mycelial networks are transport networks. Boddy’s mycelial road map is another good illustration. Mushroom growth is another: To push their way through asphalt, a mushroom must inflate with water. For this to happen, water must travel rapidly through the network from one place to another and flow into a developing mushroom in a carefully directed pulse.”
― Merlin Sheldrake, Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures

“The people who had witnessed the mushroom cloud rising from Hiroshima could’ve felt no less.”
― Joe Hill, The Fireman

“Saltwater marsh, some say, can eat a cement block for breakfast, and not even the sheriff’s bunker-style office could keep it at bay. Watermarks, outlined with salt crystals, waved across the lower walls, and black mildew spread like blood vessels toward the ceiling. Tiny dark mushrooms hunkered in the corners. The sheriff pulled a bottle from the bottom drawer of his desk and poured them both a double in coffee mugs. They sipped until the sun, as golden and syrupy as the bourbon, slipped into the sea.”
― Delia Owens, Where the Crawdads Sing

“Like Kimmerer, I wish for a language that recognizes and advances the animacy of the world, ‘the life that pulses through pines and nuthatches and mushrooms . . . well[ing] up all around us’. Like Kimmerer, I relish those aspects of discourse that extend being and sentience respectfully and flexibly beyond the usual bearers of such qualities. Like Kimmerer I believe that we need, now, a ‘grammar of animacy’. A modern predisposition to regard animacy as anomaly runs through what the poet Jeremy Prynne once called ‘mammal language’, by which he means the language that is used by humans, encoding intent, agency and muscular power deep in its grammar.”
― Robert McFarlane

“Potawatomi, a Native American language of the Great Plains region, includes the word puhpowee, which might be translated as ‘the force which causes mushrooms to push up from the earth overnight’. In ‘all its technical vocabulary’, Robin Wall Kimmerer notes, ‘Western science has no such term, no words to hold this mystery.”
― Robert McFarlane

“It's basty!"
"There's definitely a soup underneath the crust. I see carrots. Gingko nuts. Mushrooms. And...
Shark fin! Simmered until it's falling apart!"
Aah! It's all too much! I-I don't care if I burn my mouth...
I want to dive in right now!
Mm! Mmmm!
UWAAAAH!
"Incredible! The shark fin melts into a soft wave of warm umami goodness on the tongue...
...with the crispy piecrust providing a delectably crunchy contrast!"
"Mmm... this piecrust shows all the signs of the swordsmanship he stole from Eishi Tsukasa too."
Instead of melting warm butter to mix into the flour, he grated cold butter into granules and blended them...
... to form small lumps that then became airy layers during the baking, making the crust crispier and lighter. A light, airy crust like that soaks up the broth, making it the perfect complement to this dish!
"Judge Ohizumi, what's that "basty" thing you were talking about?"
"It's a dish in a certain style of cooking that's preserved for centuries in Nagasaki- Shippoku cuisine."
"Shippoku cuisine?"
Centuries ago, when Japan was still closed off from the rest of the world, only the island of Dejima in Nagasaki was permitted to trade with the West. There, a new style of cooking that fused Japanese, Chinese and Western foods was born- Shippoku cuisine! One of its signature dishes is Basty, which is a soup covered with a lattice piecrust.
*It's widely assumed that Basty originated from the Portuguese word "Pasta."*
"Shippoku cuisine is already a hybrid of many vastly different cooking styles, making it a perfect choice for this theme!"
"The lattice piecrust is French. Under it is a wonderfully savory Chinese shark fin soup. And the soup's rich chicken broth and the vegetables in it have all been thoroughly infused with powerfully aromatic spices...
... using distinctively Indian spice blends and techniques!"
"Hm? Wait a minute. There's more than just shark fin and vegetables in this soup.
This looks just like an Italian ravioli! I wonder what's in it?
?!"
"Holy crap, look at it stretch!"
"What is that?! Mozzarella?! A mochi pouch?!"
"Nope! Neither! That's Dondurma. Or as some people call it...
... Turkish ice cream.
A major ingredient in Dondurma is salep, a flour made from the root of certain orchids. It gives the dish a thick, sticky texture.
The moist chewiness of ravioli pasta melds together with the sticky gumminess of the Dondurma...
... making for an addictively thick and chewy texture!”
― Yuto Tsukuda, 食戟のソーマ 35 [Shokugeki no Souma 35]