Protoplasm, simple or nucleated, is the formal basis of all life. It is the clay of the potter: which, bake it and paint it as hewill, remains clay, separated by artifice, and not by nature from the commonest brick or sun-dried clod.
What actually happens when you die is that your brain stops working and your body rots, like Rabbit did when he died and we buried him in the earth at the bottom of the garden. And all his molecules were broken down into other molecules and they went into the earth and were eaten by worms and went into the plants and if we go and dig in the same place in 10 years there will be nothing exept his skeleton left. And in 1,000 years even his skeleton will be gone. But that is all right because he is a part of the flowers and the apple tree and the hawthorn bush now.
The organic material, as the laws of chemistry state, can neither be created nor destroyed.
The beauty of a living thing is not the atoms that go into it, but the way those atoms are put together. Information distilled over 4 billion years of biological evolution. Incidentally, all the organisms on the Earth are made essentially of that stuff. An eyedropper full of that liquid could be used to make a caterpillar or a petunia if only we knew how to put the components together.
We are over 60 percent water by weight. We're just a big ball of... blob of water, with enough organic thickener added so we don't dribble away on the floor.
Life contains these things: leakage and wickage and discharge, pus and snot and slime and gleet. We are biology. We are reminded of this at the beginning and the end, at birth and at death. In between we do what we can to forget.
By 'life,' we mean a thing that can nourish itself and grow and decay.
Flowers often grow more beautifully on dung-hills than in gardens that look beautifully kept.
The very substance which last week was grazing in the field, waving in the milk pail, or growing in the garden, is now become part of the man.
Scientists say the European space probe that landed on the comet has detected organic matter. This means there could be either life in space or a Whole Foods. We just don't know.
Tomorrow composts today.
The soil is not a mass of dead debris, merely resulting from the physical and chemical weathering of rocks; it is a more or less homogeneous system which has resulted from the decomposition of plant and animal remains. It is teeming with life.
When I’m working with materials it’s not just the leaf or the stone, it’s the processes that are behind them that are important. That’s what I’m trying to understand, not a single isolated object but nature as a whole.
The pleasure of the mulch pile is incomprehensible. I wouldn't care if they just hauled the mulch to the landfill somewhere. Obviously, grass clippings are biodegradable, but when they're bunched together at the landfill, they become badly influenced by other garbage.
Dead we become the lumber of the world.
This oak tree and me, we're made of the same stuff.
Worms are the intestines of the earth.
I'm inspired by breath, by the human body - by so many things.
The brain happens to be a meat machine.
You are not special. You are not a beautiful or unique snowflake. You're the same decaying organic matter as everything else.
With the exception of autotrophic bacteria, the green, or chlorophyll-bearing, plants are the only living forms on this planet capable of synthesizing organic matter out of inorganic elements and simple compounds.
And what a congress of stinks!- Roots ripe as old bait, Pulpy stems, rank, silo-rich, Leaf mold, manure, lime, piled against slippery planks, Nothing would give up life: Even the dirt kept breathing a small breath.
Just as a snowflakewent on to feed a puddle that filled a stream and then the river, thepumpkin patch is a gathering of molecules from my old goats, chickens,and cats, feeding the underworld of dirt creatures. And somewhere, myfather's ashes mingle with birds, air, and sea.
The idea of protoplasm, which was really a name for our ignorance, [is] only a little less misleading than the expression "Vital force".
Topsoil is a place of digestion. It sucks and chews things into smaller pieces. When it's hungry, it turns grey and stony; when it's thirsty, it opens thousands of cracked lips. Subsoil is more skeletal: it doesn't digest.
