Hope Jahren Quotes

#1. It's very liberating; I feel great. Long hair is so fucking foolish, I feel sorry for guys who have it," he said, expressing the total conviction one finds in those who have only recently been converted.

Hope Jahren

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

Hope Jahren

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

Hope Jahren

#4. Our impotent condemnation of weeds will not stop this revolution. We aren't getting the revolution we want: we're getting the one that we triggered. The

Hope Jahren

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

Hope Jahren

#6. Working in the hospital teaches you that there are only two kinds of people in the world: the sick and the not sick. If you are not sick, shut up and help.

Hope Jahren

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

Hope Jahren

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

Hope Jahren

#9. Standing within a peat bog in Dingle, you can't help wondering what Ireland was like before you and the other primates scrambled up upon its shores. When viewed from space, did it glow like a furry emerald within a sea of blue, the terrestrial equivalent of a massive marine plankton bloom? We

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#10. Can you imagine throwing away all of your possessions once a year because you are secure in your expectation that you will be able to replace them in a matter of weeks?

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#11. I am humiliated in my need, even to myself.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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#18. 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

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

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#20. 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.

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#21. Since then, I have realized that my tree had been a child once too. The embryo that became my tree sat on the ground for years, caught between the danger of waiting too long and the danger of leaving the seed too early.

Hope Jahren

#22. I suspected that they hadn't relocated to the coldest place on Earth and then taken up disemboweling pigs because things were going well in Europe, but it had never occurred to me to ask for the story. I

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#23. 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.

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#24. It is easy to become besotted with a willow. The Rapunzel of the plant world, this tree appears as a graceful princess bowed down by her lush tresses, waiting on the riverbank for someone just like you to come along and keep her company.

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#25. I smile back at her. "I must be stronger than I look." "All women are," my doctor adds while scrutinizing the womaniest part of me, improvising a pattern upon which to seam the torn pieces and hem the jagged edges. Clint

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#26. Eventually it will require more nutrients to maintain the branches and roots that do not grow quite far out enough to capture those nutrients. Once it exceeds the limitations of its environment, it loses all. And this is why you must trim a tree periodically in order to preserve it.

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#27. People are like plants: they grow toward the light.

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

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

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#30. 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.

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#31. When building foliage, a tree must budget for each leaf individually and allocate for each position relative to the other leaves. A good business plan will allow our tree to triumph as the largest and longest-living being on your street. But it ain't easy, and it ain't cheap. The

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

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#33. Researchers generally love their calling to excess, and delight in nothing better than teaching others to love it also; as with all creatures driven by love, we can't help but breed.

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

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

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

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#37. When I was five I came to understand that I was not a boy. I still wasn't sure what I was, but it became clear that whatever I was, it was less than a boy. I saw that my brothers, who were five, ten, and fifteen years older than I, could do all of our laboratory play in the outside world.

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#38. 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.

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

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#40. Looking up, you notice that the leaves at the top of any tree are smaller, on average, than the leaves at the bottom. This allows sunlight to be caught near the base whenever the wind blows and parts the upper branches.

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#41. In my memory of those dark winter nights, my father and I own the whole science building, and we walk about like a duke and his sovereign prince, too preoccupied in our castle to bother about our frozen duchy.

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#42. A new mind-set became imperative:

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

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#44. Within this new mix of genes are unprecedented possibilities, old weaknesses eliminated, and new weaknesses that might even turn out to be strengths. This is the mechanism by which the wheels of evolution turn. All

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#45. 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

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#46. We don't know exactly how this memory works. We think it is the sum total of several complex biochemical reactions and interactions. Researchers also don't know exactly how the human memory works. They think it is the sum total of several complex biochemical reactions and interactions. The

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#47. Each beginning is the end of a waiting. We are each given exactly one chance to
be. Each of us is both impossible and inevitable. Every replete tree was first a seed that
waited.

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

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#49. Once people begin to roll their eyes and gently tell you that you're crazy, laugh with gratification. When you're a scientist, it means that you're doing it right.

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#50. That no matter what our future held, my first task would always be to kick a hole in the world and make a space for him where he could safely be his eccentric self.

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

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#52. And finally, for readers who find themselves wanting to know more about the living green that surrounds us, I recommend that they waste no time in getting ahold of P. A. Thomas's book Trees: Their Natural History (2000),

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

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#54. Instead, I would take a long, lonely journey toward adulthood with the dogged faith of the pioneer who has realized that there is no promised land but still holds out hope that the destination will be someplace better than here. On

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

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

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#57. 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

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#58. 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.

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

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#60. Yeah, I know," he agreed. "It was a surprise," he admitted. "I mean, who the hell would have expected a ninety-seven-year-old man to just up and die?" Bill's dad had indeed been only three years from his one-hundredth birthday when he shocked everyone by waking up dead one morning.

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#61. Did the very first flowers make the dinosaurs sneeze?

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#62. You're right." I played into his cynicism, but only halfheartedly. "We don't really believe that, do we?" "No, we don't," Bill admitted. "But tonight we do." I

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#63. I have accepted that I don't know all the things that I ought to know, but I do know the things that I need to know. I don't know how to say, "I love you," but I do know how to show it. The people who love me know the same.

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#64. It seemed outrageous to hope that fertility, resources, time, desire, and love could all come together in the right way, and yet most women did eventually walk that path.

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#65. Once your baby tree is in the ground, check it daily, because the first three years are critical. Remember that you are your tree's only friend in a hostile world.

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#66. 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.

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

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

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

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#70. Don't be fooled by the few red or brown leaves you find on poison ivy in the fall - the plant is not dying; it's just cheating with different pigments.

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#71. We pored over the equipment and fixed what was broken, and my father taught me how to preemptively take things apart and study how they work, so that as they inevitably failed I'd be able to restore them. He taught me that there is no shame in breaking something, only in not being able to fix it. At

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#72. People will tell you that you have to know math to be a scientist, or physics or chemistry. They're wrong. ... What comes first is a question, and you're already there. It's not nearly as involved as people make it out to be.

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

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#74. Science has taught me that everything is more complicated than we first assume, and that being able to derive happiness from discovery is a recipe for a beautiful life.

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#75. 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.

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#76. My mind spins. This last stage of pregnancy has been positively surreal. Acquaintances ask me when I will have my second kid. Doctors prod me toward contraception. How bizarre to question a woman who can't even picture herself with one baby about the logistics (or not) of a second. I

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#77. I launched into a discourse on the gradual contraction of medieval oaths invoking the Virgin Mother Mary's menstrual blood and the seepage of Christ's wounds, astounded to find any use for my college study of medieval literature.

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#78. Something so hard can be so easy if you just have a little help. In the right place, under the right conditions, you can finally stretch out into what you're supposed to be.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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#85. the many, many times in my life when I have pleaded this question "Why?" to those in power come back to me, as does the fact that I have never, ever been given an answer that's good enough for me.

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

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

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