Quotes from Hope Jahren

I'm interested in how the bare bones of the planet, things that aren't alive, are transformed into things that are alive.

We have to be very careful about acknowledging that the Internet is very good at combatting isolation, but it's not very good at delivering justice.

You can pick wild strawberries with your eyes closed, locating them by smell, for they are two parts perfume to one part taste. An hour of searching might yield a handful if you're lucky. Wild strawberries can't be encouraged, nor can they be discouraged: They come to you unbidden and unearned. They appear, or do not, by the grace of the sun.

Every acorn on the ground is just as alive as the three-hundred-year-old oak tree that towers over it.

For a tree, to endure four months of daylight is like you or I going without sleep for four months.

The world breaks a little bit every time we cut down a tree. It's so much easier to cut one down than to grow one. And so it's worth interrogating every time we do it.

During the mid-1990s, I collected thousands of hackberry fruits from trees all across the Midwest. I chemically analyzed each seed in order to formulate an equation relating the hackberry's mineral makeup to the summer temperature under which it grew.

There is nothing in the world more perfect than a slide rule. Its burnished aluminum feels cool against your lips, and if you hold it level to the light you can see God's most perfect right angle in each of its corners.

I grew up in a small town.

My lab is the place where I put my brain out on my fingers.

I grew up in a time when there were very few women in the physical sciences. And people started to ask me, 'How did you decide to become a scientist?' And I couldn't really answer. I always knew I'd grow up to have a lab because my dad had one.

All I have ever wanted is one more day in the lab with the people I care about. And every day that I get that, I am grateful.

My father was a scientist, and I grew up in his laboratory. Maybe I am like him, but he is not like me.

My laboratory is like a church because it is where I figure out what I believe.

I think being a scientist is a position of respect and power and access, and it's a privileged position in society. And I think there are fundamental mechanisms that keep men and women from achieving the same level of power and access and privilege in society.

Men and women study things differently, and it's not because of our chromosomes. It's a product of our cultural conditioning.

Women live in a world where we are forced to consider our safety at every turn. We minimize risk while we maximize activity. It's this constant balancing act that we do.

One cannot rule out a blizzard in Minnesota after Labor Day, and so when I travel for Thanksgiving or any time in the fall, I am careful to fly into Des Moines instead of Minneapolis and then drive the 200 miles north to my hometown.

I was a promising graduate student. I landed a position as a professor before I even started to write my dissertation. While I prepared to start my new job, I decided that I would begin by studying the brine that bleeds sideways within the rocks that underlie the inner Aegean region of Turkey.

The turkey oak can grow practically submerged within the wetlands of Mississippi, its leaves soft as a newborn's skin.

If every seed turned into a plant, we'd be living in a very different world.

I'm a scientist - a geobiologist who's been studying trees, flowers, seeds, and soil for over twenty years. One day, I realized that I wanted, needed, to tell people - and not just other scientists - about my life in science.

I love rocks with the unconditional love that you lavish upon a newborn baby.

I think there are fundamental power imbalances between the sexes that play themselves out in society. And I think science is just not immune to that - which actually isn't a very controversial stance if you think about it.