Hope Jahren Quotes

The live oak can grow sturdily on the hottest hills of central California, contrasting dark green against the golden grass.

What idiocy, to racing into this story and its labyrinths, sprinting away from our happiness among the fresh spring grasses by the oak.

Leaves turned to soil beneath my feet. Thus it is, trees eat themselves.

Im a strong proponent of the restoration of the wetlands, for a lot of reasons. Theres a practical reason, though, when it comes to hurricanes: The stronger the wetlands, the more likely the damage of the hurricane.

If we don't preserve forest habitat for spotted owls, then soon we won't have trees to refresh the air we breathe. And we're realizing that this applies to social ecology, as well.

There are no other Everglades in the world.

The air was cool enough to make the warm sun pleasant on one's back and shoulders, and so clear that the eye could follow a hawk up and up, into the blazing blue depths of the sky.

I always wanted to grow up fast. I longed for more than the Mississippi Delta could give.

When I consider that the noble animals have been exterminated here - the cougar, panther, lynx, wolverine, wolf, bear, moose, deer, the beaver, the turkey, etc, etc - I cannot but feel as I lived in a tamed, and, as it were, emasculated country.

All mothers think their children are oaks, but the world never lacks for cabbages.

Learn about a pine tree from a pine tree, and about a bamboo plant from a bamboo plant.

We have lost a true public servant with the passing of Alan Nunnelee, who dedicated so much of his life to improving Mississippi, my thoughts and prayers are with Tori and the entire Nunnelee family at this sad time.

I think there will be great leaders emerging from the State of Mississippi. The people that have the experience to know and the people not interested in letting somebody pat you on the back and tell us "I think it is right." And it is very important for us not to accept a compromise and after I got back to Mississippi, people there said it was the most important step that had been taken.

Far off in the red mangroves an alligator has heaved himself onto a hummock of grass and lies there, studying his poems.

A tree without roots will fall over, whereas a tree with roots eventually becomes part of a forest.

Within days they'd formed an unholy alliance with a foppish young French vampire in the Garden District who had implausibly golden hair and a streak of ruthlessness as wide as the Mississippi

As I stood and watched the mists slowly rising this morning I wondered what view was more beautiful than this.

The average Southerner has the speech patterns of someone slipping in and out of consciousness. I can change my shoes and socks faster than most people in Mississippi can speak a sentence.

Hope and the future for me are not in lawns and cultivated fields, not in towns and cities, but in the impervious and quaking swamps.

I had seen a herd of Elephant travelling through dense native forest ... pacing along as if they had an appointment at the end of the world.

A true forest is not merely a storehouse full of wood, but, as it were, a factory of wood.

My special cause, the one that alerts my interest and quickens the pace of my life, is to preserve the wildflowers and native plants that define the regions of our land-to encourage and promote their use in appropriate areas, and thus help pass on to generation in waiting the quiet jobs and satisfactions I have known since my childhood.

A black-crowned night heron stood on an apron of wet sand, looking across the channel. The feather plume at the back of his head lifted in a faint breeze. Out there the channel churned its cyclonic eddies counterclockwise. Schools of anchovies, halibut, and sea bass came and went: silver flashes, small storms that well up from the inside of the sea but are short-lived, like lightning.

There is no description, no image in any book that is capable of replacing the sight of real trees, and all of the life to be found around them in a real forest.

The most primitive places left with us are the swamps, where the spruce still grows shaggy with usnea.