Hope Jahren Quotes

Any sign that the newbie regarded his or her time as of any value whatsoever was a bad omen,

Ain't no reason for you to be in all that pain.

A CACTUS DOESN'T LIVE in the desert because it likes the desert; it lives there because the desert hasn't killed it yet.

One-third of the Earth's land used to be covered in forest. Every ten years, we cut down about 1 percent of this total forest, never to be regrown.

The Bible is always short on details. Didn't Stephen's innate sense of self-preservation thwart his martyrdom at all?

No writer in the world agonizes over words the way a scientist does. Terminology is everything:

FOR TREES THAT LIVE in the snow, winter is a journey. Plants do not travel through

You may think a mushroom is a fungus. This is exactly like believing that a penis is a man.

It wasn't until I was seventeen and moved away to college that I discovered how the world is mostly populated by strangers. When

I didn't foresee anything that might kill me that day, and not getting killed was my new bar for what constituted a good day.

All the sugar that you have ever eaten was first made within a leaf.

after a man reaches ninety-five and hasn't died yet, the people around him become lulled into believing that he never will.

Every kiss that I give my child heals one that I had ached for but was not given - indeed, it has turned out to be the only thing that ever could.

It was kind of tragic, I reflected, that we all spent our lives working but never really got good at our work, or even finished it.

My strongest memory of our garden is not how it smelled, or even looked, but how it sounded.

America says it loves science, but it sure as hell doesn't want to pay for it.

I used to pray to be made stronger; now I pray to be made grateful. Every

A new mind-set became imperative:

Tiny but determined, I navigated the confusing and unstable path of being what you are while knowing that it's more than people want to see. Back

No matter what you say while in the hospital, doctors won't laugh at your jokes.

My lab is a place where it matters if I get hurt.

I wanted to be studying plant growth, but science for war will always pay better than science for knowledge.

Working in a lab for twenty years has left me with two stories: the one that I have to write, and the one that I want to. Science is an institution

Love and learning are similar in that they can never be wasted.

You shouldn't take this job too seriously. Except for when you should.

I wonder who else in the world was having such an exquisite dawn.

Every object in my lab - no matter how small or misshapen - exists for a reason, even if its purpose has not yet been found. My

Being paid to wonder seems like a heavy responsibility at times.

When you grow up around people who don't speak very much, what they do say to you is indelible.

The doctors, nurses, and I didn't cry because the bewildered husbands and stricken daughters were crying enough for all of us.

People are like plants: they grow toward the light.

The surface area of this root system is easily one hundred times greater than that of all the leaves put together.

However much you love your job, it ain't gonna love you back.

He taught me that there is no shame in breaking something, only in not being able to fix it.

Did the very first flowers make the dinosaurs sneeze?

It takes a long time to turn into what you're supposed to be.

It's inescapable: at this very moment, within the synapses of your brain, leaves are fueling thoughts of leaves. A

And because I know the transcendent value of loyalty, I've been to places that a person can't get to any other way.

discovery and mischief are two sides of the very same coin.

Like anyone else who harbors precious secrets wrought from years of searching, I have longed for someone to tell.

I have learned that raising a child is essentially one long, slow agony of letting go.

The gamble is everything, and losing means death. The odds are more than a million to one against success.

Everything about my life looked pretty well messed up compared with how adulthood had always been advertised to me. I

So humor me for a minute, and look out your window. What did you see?

I am humiliated in my need, even to myself.

She then turns to Clint. "That being said, if something happens to you, like you faint, we will kick you to the side and keep going.

These plants know that when your world is changing rapidly, it is important to have identified the one thing that you can always count upon.

It was a new idea, my first real leaf. Just like every other audacious seedling in the world, I would make it up as I went along.

it is a hard-hearted monkey indeed that remains unmoved during a good slathering of bacitracin, and

Along the way, we also managed to become adults without ceasing to be children.

People don't know to make a leaf, but they know how to destroy one.

I hear my own voice shrieking out its bewilderment at finding so many imperfections within a world of limitless potential.