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" 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. "

Hope Jahren

Eyes

Grace

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

Hope Jahren

Care

People

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" No matter how much funding I get, I'm always thinking, 'This is temporary. This is fragile. It could all end tomorrow, and how am I going to make today worth it? If this is my last day in the lab, what can I do so that I can walk out of here saying, 'That was a good day?'' "

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

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

" 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. "

Hope Jahren

See

You

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

Hope Jahren

Hands

Women

" 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. "

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

" Ask a science professor what she worries about. It won't take long. She'll look you in the eye and say one word: 'Money.' "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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 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. "

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

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

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

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

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

" My earliest memories are being in the lab, and the way the cement felt and the way it smelled, and the way the countertops looked and it just being this wonderful, warm, happy place where it was just full of toys. "