Quotes from Hope Jahren

I love the quiet forest that stands between my lab and my home.

The absence of women within STEM programs is not only progressive, it is persistent - despite more than 20 years of programs intended to encourage the participation of girls and women.

The world is a fickle place, and it's not fair. But if you're getting most of your rewards from you, then you can use that as a kind of compass, and you can be secure in the fact that you're working for the right reason, and you're going in the right direction.

The live oak can grow sturdily on the hottest hills of central California, contrasting dark green against the golden grass.

It's very important to put children in an environment where they can take things apart; where they can break things and then learn to fix them; where they can trust their hands and know their capacity to manipulate objects.

Corn occupies a really special role in what I've been calling American agro-economics.

I think, as you move to the upper ranks of science - ranks being positions of influence and access - you see fewer female faces. And I think the basic reason is the same reason that you don't see a lot of female faces in Congress or on the Supreme Court or on the directing board of Fortune 500 companies.

Plants are decisive to a fault. A stem produces a bud that flowers once and once only. It offers pollen that is either dispersed or goes nowhere. One pollen grain either enters a stigma or it falls upon stony ground. An ovum is either fertilized or the whole project stalls out.

I grew up playing with kids who were the kids of people my parents grew up playing with, and they know me like nobody else. I thought everybody was that way when I was growing up, and then I left to go to college, and I realised that the world is full of strangers.

People love the ocean. People are always asking me why I don't study the ocean, because, after all, I live in Hawaii. I tell them that it's because the ocean is a lonely, empty place.

In my Scandinavian-American family, we were conditioned never to sit, at least not comfortably. I was endlessly going back to work. We longed for the fleeting respite of being useful and regarded sleep as a reward for exhaustion, always to be deferred until after the sun goes down.

I am not the only scientist to be struck by the power and meaning of Lamium album in bloom.

Science is performed by people, and it's subject to all the various foibles that plague the rest of our social dynamics.

I am not a farmer; I am a researcher who studies the plants that come to your dinner table, which means that I ask questions for a living.

I am a scientist who studies plants. I like plants. I think about plants almost every hour of the day, and several hours of the night as well.

While both plants and animals awaken via distinct changes in metabolic functioning, most plants prefer to err on the side of caution, waiting for hints of full-on summer before they bloom.