Quotes from Hope Jahren

I spend a lot of time talking to other scientists and writing to other scientists.

Women scientists' hands are like every other woman's hands.

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.

I think the best learning is done with active manipulation. And we need to be able to work with our hands; it's not just about using our brains.

We must continue as in millennia past, nourishing the future as we feed ourselves and, each year, plant only the very best of what we have collectively engineered.

Plants are not like us, and the more you study plants, the more different and deep ways you see that they are not like us.

My father was a physicist, while I am a biogeochemist. I live to study plants, and he has never had more than a generic interest in biology.

I think plants present an opportunity for people to look closely at something and get invested in something that's truly very much outside of themselves.

The type of science that I do is sometimes known as 'curiosity-driven research.' This means that my work will never result in a marketable product, a useful machine, a prescribable pill, a formidable weapon, or any direct gain.

I like weeds and hardy plants.

I grew up in my father's laboratory and played beneath the chemical benches until I was tall enough to play on them.

You can't drive through Iowa and not think about farming: No less than 85 percent of the land in the state is devoted to farms, many of them more than 1,000 acres. This is the place where seeds are sown. It's where farmers grow the corn that will be fed to pigs as grain or fed to you as syrup or fermented to ethanol for your gas tank.

Women study things in order to figure out how they're connected to other things. I don't know if it's controversial to say that, but that's what I've seen from doing science for a couple of decades.

A cactus doesn't live in the desert because it likes the desert; it lives there because the desert hasn't killed it yet.

A seed knows how to wait... A seed is alive while it waits.

I always knew how privileged I was to think for a living.

I think it's very common that scientists or technical people have an artistic side. Sometimes they are very accomplished musicians. Sometimes they have very fine tastes according to art or design. And often, they've spent a big chunk of their childhood or they're growing-up years trying to get in very good at those activities.

We must feed, shelter, and nurture one another as our first priority, and to do so, we must avail ourselves of our best technologies, which have always included some type of genetic modification.

Your bones are not just made of the last meal you had, but the meals that you've had across many years. By looking at the composition of those teeth, researchers can say that something was a large component of the diet. This tells us a lot about how hominins lived and what they ate.

I have learned that nothing gets readers so fired up as saying something everyone knows is true.

A true scientist doesn't perform prescribed experiments; she develops her own and thus generates wholly new knowledge.

Like all professors, I also do a lot of extra jobs for which I was never trained, such as advising former students as they navigate the wider world.

Even a very little girl can wield a slide rule, the cursor serving as a haft.

My life is pretty small. Even as a successful scientist, I'm not a public figure. I like people - I just don't know that many!