193 Quotes by Hope Jahren

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?

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.

I navigated the confusing and unstable path of being what you are while knowing that it’s more than people want to see. Back.

Ireland is so saturated with green that it’s the things that not green catch one’s eye: the roads, walls, shorelines, even sheep, seem to have been placed as contrast, strategically positioned to organize the vast expansion of green... In Ireland, you can bask in fact that you have been benevolently outnumbered by these first and better life forms. Standing in a peat bog in Dingle, you can not help wondering what Ireland was like before you and other primates scrambled upon its shore.

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.

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.

Nothing in these growth curves tells us what a tree should look like, only what trees have looked like. Every plant must find its own unique path to maturity. There.

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.

My strongest memory of our garden is not how it smelled, or even looked, but how it sounded.