Top 90 Hope Jahren Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Then I catch myself and listlessly wonder again for which of my sins I am being punished. I am sick to death of this wound that will not close; of how my babyish heart mistakes any simple kindness from a woman for a breadcrumb trail leading to the soft love of a mother or the fond approval of a grandmother. I am tired of carrying this dull orphan-pain, for though it has lost its power to surprise, every season it still reaps its harvest of hurt.”

— Hope Jahren

52. “I am humiliated in my need, even to myself.”

— Hope Jahren

53. “When you grow up around people who don’t speak very much, what they do say to you is indelible.”

— Hope Jahren

54. “Along the way, we also managed to become adults without ceasing to be children.”

— Hope Jahren

55. “Can you imagine throwing away all of your possessions once a year because you are secure in your expectation that you will be able to replace them in a matter of weeks?”

— Hope Jahren

56. “I know that I could live without him: I have my own work, my own mission, and my own money. But I don’t want to. I really don’t want to.”

— Hope Jahren

57. “For trees that live in the snow, winter is a journey. Plants do not travel through space as we do; as a rule they do not move from place to place. Instead they travel through time, enduring one event after the other, and in this sense, winter is a particularly long trip. Trees follow the standard advice given for any extended travel within a rustic setting: pack carefully.”

— Hope Jahren

58. “It was a new idea, my first real leaf. Just like every other audacious seedling in the world, I would make it up as I went along.”

— Hope Jahren

59. “There at the end of the world, he danced in the broad and endless daylight, and I accepted him for what he was, instead of for what he wished he could be. The potency of my acceptance made me wonder, just a little, if I could turn it inward and accept myself.”

— Hope Jahren

60. “Every kiss that I give my child heals one that I had ached for but was not given – indeed, it has turned out to be the only thing that ever could.”

— Hope Jahren

61. “I have accepted that I don’t know all the things that I ought to know, but I do know the things that I need to know. I don’t know how to say, “I love you,” but I do know how to show it. The people who love me know the same.”

— Hope Jahren

62. “Researchers generally love their calling to excess, and delight in nothing better than teaching others to love it also; as with all creatures driven by love, we can’t help but breed.”

— Hope Jahren

63. “And because I know the transcendent value of loyalty, I’ve been to places that a person can’t get to any other way.”

— Hope Jahren

64. “Everything about my life looked pretty well messed up compared with how adulthood had always been advertised to me. I.”

— Hope Jahren

65. “Yeah, I know,” he agreed. “It was a surprise,” he admitted. “I mean, who the hell would have expected a ninety-seven-year-old man to just up and die?” Bill’s dad had indeed been only three years from his one-hundredth birthday when he shocked everyone by waking up dead one morning.”

— Hope Jahren

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

— Hope Jahren

67. “I have learned that raising a child is essentially one long, slow agony of letting go.”

— Hope Jahren

68. “You probably have a bathroom scale that can tell the difference between a 180-pound man and a 185-pound man. I have a scientific scale that can tell the difference between an atom with twelve neutrons and an atom with thirteen neutrons. Actually, I have two such scales. They are called mass spectrometers, and they are worth about half a million dollars each.”

— Hope Jahren

69. “I hear my own voice shrieking out its bewilderment at finding so many imperfections within a world of limitless potential.”

— Hope Jahren

70. “I had worked and waited for this day. In solving this mystery I had also proved something, at least to myself, and I finally knew what real research would feel like. But as satisfying as it was, it still stands out as one of the loneliest moments of my life. On some deep level, the realization that I could do good science was accompanied by the knowledge that I had formally and terminally missed my chance to become like any of the women that I had ever known. In.”

— Hope Jahren

71. “My lab is a place where it matters if I get hurt.”

— Hope Jahren

72. “Our impotent condemnation of weeds will not stop this revolution. We aren’t getting the revolution we want: we’re getting the one that we triggered. The.”

— Hope Jahren

73. “Nothing could alter the overwhelming sweetness of briefly holding a small secret that the universe had earmarked just for me.”

— Hope Jahren

74. “All the baffling things that arrived unwelcome with adulthood – tax returns and car insurance and Pap smears – none of them matter when I am in the lab. There is no phone and so it doesn’t hurt when someone doesn’t call me. The door is locked and I know everyone who has a key. Because the outside world cannot come into the lab, the lab has become the place where I can be the real me. My.”

— Hope Jahren

75. “Looking up, you notice that the leaves at the top of any tree are smaller, on average, than the leaves at the bottom. This allows sunlight to be caught near the base whenever the wind blows and parts the upper branches.”

— Hope Jahren

76. “Once people begin to roll their eyes and gently tell you that you’re crazy, laugh with gratification. When you’re a scientist, it means that you’re doing it right.”

— Hope Jahren

77. “I wonder who else in the world was having such an exquisite dawn.”

— Hope Jahren

78. “We talked about it with the benefit of distance and hindsight –.”

— Hope Jahren

79. “I have accepted that I don’t know all the things that I ought to know, but I do know things that I need to know.”

— Hope Jahren

80. “My mother taught me that reading is a kind of work, and that every paragraph merits exertion, and in this way, I learned how to absorb difficult books.”

— Hope Jahren

81. “When I was five I came to understand that I was not a boy. I still wasn’t sure what I was, but it became clear that whatever I was, it was less than a boy. I saw that my brothers, who were five, ten, and fifteen years older than I, could do all of our laboratory play in the outside world.”

— Hope Jahren

82. “And where did the stones come from anyway, when they stoned people? Did people collect them on the way to the scene? About how many stones did each thrower figure that he needed? Did they examine each one they picked up, discarding and retaining them based on some criterion? Did women get to throw too, or did they just simper on the periphery, as depicted by Raphael?”

— Hope Jahren

83. “The first green tissues of a radish seedling are two perfectly heart-shaped, symmetric leaves. In twenty years of growing hundreds of these plants, I have seen exactly two deviants, each with a perfect third leaf – a baffling green triad where there should be only a pair. I think of those two plants often, and they even enter my dreams occasionally, causing me to wonder why I was meant to see them. Being paid to wonder seems like a heavy responsibility at times. At.”

— Hope Jahren

84. “While you’re at it, would you carve Bill’s name into your tree as well? He’s told me a hundred times over that he’ll never read this book because it would be pointless.”

— Hope Jahren

85. “As a tiny, living part of the scientific collective, I’ve sat alone countless nights in the dark, burning my metal candle and watching a foreign world with an aching heart. Like anyone else who harbors precious secrets wrought from years of searching, I have longed for someone to tell.”

— Hope Jahren

86. “Henry George was also right in that most of the want and suffering that we see in our world today originates not from Earth’s inability to provide but from our inability to share. It is because so many of us consume far beyond our needs that a great many more of us are left with almost nothing.”

— Hope Jahren

87. “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. Every replete tree was first a seed that waited.”

— Hope Jahren

88. “There are two ways to deal with a major setback: one is to pause, take a deep breath, clear your mind and go home, distract yourself for the evening, and come back fresh the next day to start over. The other is to immediately resubmerge, put your head under and dive to the bottom, work an hour longer than you did last night, and stay in the moment of what went wrong. While the first way is a good path toward adequacy, it is the second way that leads to important discoveries. One.”

— Hope Jahren

89. “When building foliage, a tree must budget for each leaf individually and allocate for each position relative to the other leaves. A good business plan will allow our tree to triumph as the largest and longest-living being on your street. But it ain’t easy, and it ain’t cheap. The.”

— Hope Jahren

90. “All measures of conservation, as well as all technologies meant to wean us from fossil fuels, are worth pursuing in the same way that doing something is always more than doing nothing.”

— Hope Jahren

91. “At the end of a mass extinction, the tree of life has lost several branches-and yet, afterward, life does go on. Plants regreen the earth and animals repopulate the oceans; different species relentless forward march. There will be life on planet Earth after the sixth mass extinction, but we are not able to imagine it any better than the dinosaurs could have imagined a world dominated by mammals walking on two legs, driving bulldozers, and flying airplanes.”

— Hope Jahren

92. “Every single year, at least one tree is cut down in your name. Here’s my personal request to you: If you own private land at all, plant one tree this year.”

— Hope Jahren

93. “It wasn’t until I was seventeen and moved away to college that I discovered how the world is mostly populated by strangers. When.”

— Hope Jahren

94. “I was stunned to find that the ultimate proof of love for me was nothing heroic, but an easy and superfluous gesture performed just to make me smile. The love that I had to give someone had been packed too tightly and too long in a small box, and so it all tumbled out when opened. And there was more where that came from.”

— Hope Jahren

95. “The average person cannot imagine himself staring at dirt for longer than the twenty seconds needed to pick up whatever object he just dropped, but this class was not for the average person.”

— Hope Jahren

96. “We had long since established the habit of not speaking as we walked the two miles home; silent togetherness is what Scandinavian families do naturally, and it may be what they do best.”

— Hope Jahren

97. “I feel the old childish hope involuntarily stirred, that perhaps this woman cares and understands.”

— Hope Jahren

98. “All human beings are a lot better at describing what is happening than at predicting what will happen. Somewhere along the way, however, we began to hope that scientists were different – that they could be right all the time. And because they’re not, we kind of stopped listening. By now we’re quite practiced at not listening to things scientists say over and over again.”

— Hope Jahren