Lab Girl Quotes
"People love the ocean. People are always asking me why I don’t study the ocean, because, after all, I live in Hawaii."
"There is six hundred times more life on land than there is in the ocean, and this fact mostly comes down to plants."
"The average ocean plant is one cell that lives for about twenty days."
"The average land plant is a two-ton tree that lives for more than one hundred years."
"As a rule, people live among plants but they don’t really see them."
"What you saw was invented more than four hundred million years ago near the equator."
"People don’t know how to make a leaf, but they know how to destroy one."
"We should care for the same basic reason that we are always bound to care: because someone died who didn’t have to."
"People will tell you that you have to know math to be a scientist, or physics or chemistry. They’re wrong."
"My laboratory is like a church because it is where I figure out what I believe."
"Every replete tree was first a seed that waited."
"Working in the hospital teaches you that there are only two kinds of people in the world: the sick and the not sick."
"I couldn’t cure anybody. I could follow a recipe and wait to see what happened."
"No risk is more terrifying than that taken by the first root."
"Everything is risked in that one moment when the first cells advance from the seed coat."
"The gamble is everything, and losing means death."
"Once the first root is extended, the plant will never again enjoy any hope of relocating to a place less cold, less dry, less dangerous."
"A leaf is a platter of pigment strung with vascular lace."
"Without a constant supply of glucose to your brain, you will die."
"Every piece of wood in your house was once part of a living being, thriving in the open and pulsing with sap."
"Establishing yourself as a scientist takes an awfully long time."
"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."
"Nothing in the world exposes human helplessness and folly quite like a tree that will not bloom."
"Boiling water on a campfire is tortuously slow."
"I am making Hungarian potato dumplings," he explained. "Trust me, you’ll love them."
"This digging can take hours, and if the clay is thick or the soil is waterlogged, it is physically exhausting."
"The warm night air was perfectly still and we could hear a chorus of frogs that were croaking somewhere in the darkness."
"Bill is the most patient, caring, and respectful teacher that I have ever seen in action."
"A vine makes it up as it goes along. The copious vine seeds that rain down from the top of the forest sprout easily, but only rarely take root."
"A barrel cactus has folds like an accordion, and deep within these folds are the pores that let air in and water evaporate out."
"Full-blown mania lets you see the other side of death."
"A cactus doesn’t live in the desert because it likes the desert; it lives there because the desert hasn’t killed it yet."
"The desert is like a lot of lousy neighborhoods: nobody living there can afford to move."
"We love each other because we can’t help it."
"Life is quiet and surreal. You abandon your habit of keeping track of what day and what time it is."
"All sex involves touch: the living tissues of two separate individuals must come into contact and then attach."
"One grain of pollen is all that is necessary to fertilize an ovum and then develop into a seed."
"We make plans: he will share his strength with me and I will share my imagination with him."
"I have to see my science for it to be real: I must hold it in my hands and manipulate it."
"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."
"Successful plant sex may be rare, but when it does happen it triggers a supernova of new possibilities."
"In the Arctic during the summer, you sleep until you wake up, you eat until you’re full, and you work until you’re tired."
"Why don’t you drive?" he added. Bill took the keys and we spent the day at Fort McHenry bobbing for apples and dipping candles and forging a real horseshoe.
"These scientists had weighed their potted plants daily, and for the entire first month they saw very little growth."
"Becoming a tree is a long journey, and so even the most experienced botanist cannot look at a twig on a sapling and accurately describe what kind of branch it might develop into over the next fifty years."
"Every plant must find its own unique path to maturity."
"Why would a plant decrease in mass just when it is nearing its plateau of maximum productivity?"
"I wonder what kind of god in what kind of heaven decided that a hundred-and-ten-pound woman could carry thirty-five pounds of baby."
"The statistics are pretty simple: a bipolar woman is seven times as likely to experience a major episode while pregnant, compared with before or after."
"Eighteen years from now I will have a grown man living inside my body."
"We all got in for a reduced rate because it was, after all, Family Day."
"Every living being on the Earth’s surface has been conscripted into a never-ending war over a total amount of water that equals less than one-thousandth of one percent of the planet’s total."
"No parent can make life perfect for its offspring, but we are all moved to provide for them as best we can."
"There is no "right" or "wrong" way to grow into a hundred-year-old tree: there are only ways that work and ways that do not."
"Upon gaining new resources, a plant may perform one of four actions: it will either grow, repair, defend, or reproduce itself."
"Carbon dioxide is the currency of photosynthesis, and plants have now seen decades of an increasingly lavish excess of their most basic resource."
"The video was a time-lapse compilation of photos taken once every twenty seconds, condensing all of the previous day’s growth into four minutes of video."
"For several nights now, we had moved C-6 around, changed its neighbors, measured and compared it endlessly."
"While Bill downloaded and reset the video camera in anticipation of another experiment, I rewatched the video seven or eight times."
"I think he does a little fist-pump right afterward," I observed.
"Our fascination with C-6 was not a scientifically legitimate experiment."
"I had to conclude that C-6 did things—not just because he was programmed to do so, but also for reasons known only to him."
"I stood back and smiled at Bill and all the silly undergrads, and felt the joy that accompanies a new thought."
"Every single year, at least one tree is cut down in your name."
"Plant a tree in it and see if your landlord notices."
"You are marrying this tree: choose a partner, not an ornament."
"Once your baby tree is in the ground, check it daily, because the first three years are critical."
"I don’t take advice from my colleagues, and I try not to give it."
"As a scientist I am indeed only an ant, insufficient and anonymous, but I am stronger than I look and part of something that is much bigger than I am."
"Plants are not like us. They are different in critical and fundamental ways."
"Our world is falling apart quietly. Human civilization has reduced the plant, a four-hundred-million-year-old life form, into three things: food, medicine, and wood."
"If we continue to fell healthy trees at this rate, less than six hundred years from now, every tree on the planet will have been reduced to a stump."
"But on my good days, I feel like I can do something about this."