Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I grew up in a small town.
I like weeds and hardy plants.
A tree's wood is also its memoir.
I always knew how privileged I was to think for a living.
Women scientists' hands are like every other woman's hands.
A seed knows how to wait... A seed is alive while it waits.
My lab is the place where I put my brain out on my fingers.
I love the quiet forest that stands between my lab and my home.
Regardless of politics, our world will continue to change rapidly.
If every seed turned into a plant, we'd be living in a very different world.
Even a very little girl can wield a slide rule, the cursor serving as a haft.
I love rocks with the unconditional love that you lavish upon a newborn baby.
My laboratory is like a church because it is where I figure out what I believe.
I spend a lot of time talking to other scientists and writing to other scientists.
Corn occupies a really special role in what I've been calling American agro-economics.
Regardless of what humans do to the climate, there will still be a rock orbiting the sun.
I am not the only scientist to be struck by the power and meaning of Lamium album in bloom.
I have learned that nothing gets readers so fired up as saying something everyone knows is true.
For a tree, to endure four months of daylight is like you or I going without sleep for four months.
Every acorn on the ground is just as alive as the three-hundred-year-old oak tree that towers over it.
My father was a scientist, and I grew up in his laboratory. Maybe I am like him, but he is not like me.
I grew up in my father's laboratory and played beneath the chemical benches until I was tall enough to play on them.
My father's schooling during the 1930s was heavy with memorization; eight decades later, he is reaping the benefits.
The turkey oak can grow practically submerged within the wetlands of Mississippi, its leaves soft as a newborn's skin.
A true scientist doesn't perform prescribed experiments; she develops her own and thus generates wholly new knowledge.
A cactus doesn't live in the desert because it likes the desert; it lives there because the desert hasn't killed it yet.
Science is performed by people, and it's subject to all the various foibles that plague the rest of our social dynamics.
I'm interested in how the bare bones of the planet, things that aren't alive, are transformed into things that are alive.
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.'
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.
The live oak can grow sturdily on the hottest hills of central California, contrasting dark green against the golden grass.
Men and women study things differently, and it's not because of our chromosomes. It's a product of our cultural conditioning.
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.
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!
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.
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.
I think my job is to leave some evidence for future generations that there was somebody who cared while we were destroying everything.
What is a berry? It is an ovary swaddled within a sugary womb. Plainly put, a berry is the fruition of a flower - the ultimate tautology.
I am not a farmer; I am a researcher who studies the plants that come to your dinner table, which means that I ask questions for a living.
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.
I am a scientist who studies plants. I like plants. I think about plants almost every hour of the day, and several hours of the night as well.
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.
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.
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.
Like all professors, I also do a lot of extra jobs for which I was never trained, such as advising former students as they navigate the wider world.
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.
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.
We must continue as in millennia past, nourishing the future as we feed ourselves and, each year, plant only the very best of what we have collectively engineered.
As an environmental scientist, I think our first need is to feed and shelter and nurture. That has always required the exploitation of plant life, and it always will.
The world breaks a little bit every time we cut down a tree. It's so much easier to cut one down than to grow one. And so it's worth interrogating every time we do it.