Hope Jahren Quotes

Every seed is awakened, and all animal life.

Think about a seed. Once it lands, it's stuck. It can't move to find better soil, moisture or sunlight. It's able to create every part of itself to grow and reproduce with the help of air, water and sun.

Basically, the intersection between the animal world and the plant world is where life regenerates itself over and over, billions of times each day. It's the foundation of life on our planet.

It is part of the fundamental impulse in all living things to reach for light, part of the indomitable will to see.

Age is not all decay; it is the ripening, the swelling, of the fresh life within, that withers and bursts the husk.

There have only been about a half dozen genuinely important events in the four-billion-year saga of life on Earth: single-celled life, multicelled life, differentiation into plants and animals, movement of animals from water to land, and the advent of mammals and consciousness.

If we understand the worm, we understand life.

Whatever life may really be, it is to us an abstraction: for the word is a generalised term to signify that which is common to all animals and plants, and which is not directly operative in the inorganic world.

Biology

We recognize in a plant some unknown power, a single, form-giving force, which creates and conserves, which moves unwaveringly toward its end, which appropriates what is useful to it and rejects that which would harm it.

When you think about the complexity of our natural world - plants using quantum mechanics for photosynthesis, for example - a smartphone begins to look like a pretty dumb object.

As far as plants are concerned, they can't tell whether that nitrate ion comes from artificial chemicals or from decomposed organic matter.

For my part, I hold it equally impossible for a small shellfish to be produced without generation as for a whale to have its origin from the mud.

In the last 680 million years of the four and a half billion that this planet has existed, life has been determined by two principal forces: the warmth and the diffused energy of the sunlight coming through our atmosphere, and water. Those are the primordial forces of life - sunlight and water.

It's a constant thing we do in life... I marry someone or have kids; these are the evolutions of life that we go on. There are constant shifts.

I still see life entirely through its Darwinian prism. I keep trying to shake off the aftereffects of writing 'The Thing About Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead', and I find I can't.

I think there's seasons of life. It oscillates.

Everyone is always making transitions in life.

Life is like a book: one has to know when to turn the page.

Trees and flowers are so important. The idea of blooming is the idea of becoming something different.

Aging followed by death is the price we pay for the immortality of our genes. You find this information soul-killing; I find it thrilling, liberating.

To a new generation of butterflies, hopefully less stupid than last. Maybe they were burgeoning even now in fat little cocoons. Or maybe not.

The sun gives spirit and life to the plants and the earth nourishes them with moisture.

There is life in the ground; it goes into the seeds and also when it is stirred up goes into the man who stirs it.

Life is like a book that never ends. Chapters close, but not the book itself.