Hope Jahren

A tree's wood is also its memoir.

— Hope Jahren

I grew up in a small town.

— Hope Jahren

I like weeds and hardy plants.

— Hope Jahren

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

— Hope Jahren

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

— Hope Jahren

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

— Hope Jahren

I love to read stories. And I don't to get to talk about my favorite novels very often in my job.

— Hope Jahren

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

— Hope Jahren

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

— Hope Jahren

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

— Hope Jahren

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

— Hope Jahren

In New England, the pin oak thrives, its leaves tipping to a thorny point in a good-natured impression of its evergreen neighbor,…

— Hope Jahren

“You and I are going to work our asses off, teach them shit over and over, risk our fucking lives for them,…

— Hope Jahren

While both plants and animals awaken via distinct changes in metabolic functioning, most plants prefer to err on the side of caution,…

— Hope Jahren

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

— Hope Jahren

“In my own small experience, sexism has been something very simple: the cumulative weight of constantly being told that you can’t possibly…

— Hope Jahren

The world breaks a little bit every time we cut down a tree. It's so much easier to cut one down than…

— Hope Jahren

In our tiny town, my father wasn't a scientist - he was the scientist, and being a scientist wasn't his job: it…

— 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.

— Hope Jahren

I think there are fundamental power imbalances between the sexes that play themselves out in society. And I think science is just…

— Hope Jahren

I was a promising graduate student. I landed a position as a professor before I even started to write my dissertation. While…

— Hope Jahren

I'm a scientist - a geobiologist who's been studying trees, flowers, seeds, and soil for over twenty years. One day, I realized…

— Hope Jahren

I think it's very common that scientists or technical people have an artistic side. Sometimes they are very accomplished musicians. Sometimes they…

— Hope Jahren

In my Scandinavian-American family, we were conditioned never to sit, at least not comfortably. I was endlessly going back to work. We…

— Hope Jahren

No matter how much funding I get, I'm always thinking, 'This is temporary. This is fragile. It could all end tomorrow, and…

— Hope Jahren

When I was 23, my Norwegian relatives taught me how to sit still. During the long sunlit evenings in the summer of…

— Hope Jahren

I am a scientist. To be specific, I am a woman scientist. This, I have been told and have come to believe,…

— Hope Jahren

“It was kind of tragic, I reflected, that we all spent our lives working but never really got good at our work,…

— Hope Jahren

“I sat directly in front of him, held my head up, and watched. I watched him, as a clear-eyed witness of what…

— Hope Jahren

“I started out studying literature, but soon discovered that science was where I actually belonged. The contrast made it all the clearer:…

— Hope Jahren

“No writer in the world agonizes over words the way a scientist does. Terminology is everything: we identify something by its established…

— Hope Jahren

“I cry because I can see only what I am losing and not what I will gain,”

— Hope Jahren

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

— Hope Jahren

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

— Hope Jahren

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

— Hope Jahren

Regardless of politics, our world will continue to change rapidly.

— Hope Jahren

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

— Hope Jahren

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

— Hope Jahren

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

— Hope Jahren

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

— Hope Jahren