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" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" America may say that it values science, but it sure as hell doesn't want to pay for it. "

" Regardless of what humans do to the climate, there will still be a rock orbiting the sun. "

" 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! "

" A tree's wood is also its memoir. "

" 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. "

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

" When I was 23, my Norwegian relatives taught me how to sit still. During the long sunlit evenings in the summer of 1992, my cousins would lead me across the farm to the edge of the forest, each of us lugging a folding chair. There, in a scraggly bramble of wild blueberries, we would set them down a few yards apart, each in our own little patch. "

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

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

" The wood of any tree growing anywhere records fairly faithfully the oxygen and hydrogen chemistry of the water the plant has access to through precipitation. "

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

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

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

" 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. "

" I grew up in a small town. "

" 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. "

" 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 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. "

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

" I think we get used to not seeing the green things around us. I think they become the backdrop of our lives. And I think you actively have to ask somebody to request that they put that in the foreground. "

" There is a fundamental and culturally learned power imbalance between men and women, and it follows us into the workplace. The violence born of this imbalance follows us also. We would like to believe that it stops short of following us into the laboratory and into the field - but it does not. "

" When I was five, I came to understand that I was not a boy. "