“In my Scandinavian-American family, we were conditioned never to sit, ...” — Hope Jahren Quote

In my Scandinavian-American family, we were conditioned never to sit, at least not comfortably. I was endlessly going back to work. We longed for the fleeting respite of being useful and regarded sleep as a reward for exhaustion, always to be deferred until after the sun goes down.

You can't drive through Iowa and not think about farming: No less than 85 percent of the land in the state is devoted to farms, many of them more than 1,000 acres. This is the place where seeds are sown. It's where farmers grow the corn that will be fed to pigs as grain or fed to you as syrup or fermented to ethanol for your gas tank.

If every seed turned into a plant, we'd be living in a very different world.

During the mid-1990s, I collected thousands of hackberry fruits from trees all across the Midwest. I chemically analyzed each seed in order to formulate an equation relating the hackberry's mineral makeup to the summer temperature under which it grew.

It's always good to win a Test match and if you win it comfortably, it can leave a few psychological marks on opposition sides.

I can't learn lines comfortably unless I have it done out loud with someone else.

The fact that you can love something that you've lost is all the incentive you need to love again, as opposed to becoming comfortably numb.

The fact that you can love something that's lost is all of the incentive that you'll ever need to love again as opposed to becoming comfortably numb.

After two terms as California's Governator, Schwarzenegger slipped comfortably back into pictures with 'The Last Stand,' a modern Western, then crammed into the wide screen, as if it were a service elevator, with fellow '80s muscle car Sylvester Stallone in 'Escape Plan.'