Diane Ackerman quotes:

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  • Nothing is more memorable than a smell. One scent can be unexpected, momentary and fleeting, yet conjure up a childhood summer beside a lake in the mountains.

  • As people flock to urban centers where ground space is limited, cities with green walls and roofs and skyscraper farms offer improved health and well-being, renewable resources, reliable food supply, and relief to the environment.

  • Just as our ancient ancestors drew animals on cave walls and carved animals from wood and bone, we decorate our homes with animal prints and motifs, give our children stuffed animals to clutch, cartoon animals to watch, animal stories to read.

  • We're dabbling in eugenics all the time, breeding ideal crops to replace less aesthetic or nutritious or hardy varieties; leveling forests to graze cattle or erect shopping malls and condos; planting groves of a few familiar trees that homeowners and industries prefer.

  • I've always loved scuba diving and the cell-tickling feel of being underwater, though it poses unique frustrations. Alone, but with others, you may share the same sights and feelings, but you can't communicate well.

  • Love is the best school, but the tuition is high and the homework can be painful.

  • On some summer days in New York City, the air hangs thickly visible, like the combined exhalations of eight million souls. Steam rising from vents underground makes you wonder if there isn't one giant sweat gland lodged beneath the city.

  • All relationships change the brain - but most important are the intimate bonds that foster or fail us, altering the delicate circuits that shape memories, emotions and that ultimate souvenir, the self.

  • Because we can't escape our ancient hunger to live close to nature, we encircle the house with lawns and gardens, install picture windows, adopt pets and Boston ferns, and scent everything that touches our lives.

  • Cicadas, buckling and unbuckling their stomach muscles, yield the sound of someone sharpening scissors. Fall field crickets, the thermometer hounds, add high-pitched tinkling chirps to the jazz, and their call quickens with warm weather, slows again with cool.

  • I like knowing that the further back one traces any lineage, the narrower the path grows, to the haunt of just a few shaggy ancestors, with luck on their side, little gizmos in their cells and a future storied with impulses and choices that will ultimately define them.

  • We're losing biodiversity globally at an alarming rate, and we need a cornucopia of different plants and animals, for the planet's health and our own.

  • What a lonely species we are, searching for signals of life from other galaxies, adopting companion animals, visiting parks and zoos to commune with other beasts. In the process, we discover our shared identity.

  • Gardeners may create order briefly out of chaos, but nature always gets the last word, and what it says is usually untidy by human standards. But I find all states of nature beautiful, and because I want to delight in my garden, not rule it, I just accept my yen to tame the chaos on one day and let the Japanese beetles run riot on the next.

  • When a hurricane thrashes the mid-Atlantic, my hilly town often reaps the fringe of the storm. The rain starts blowing sideways, and sometimes we see hail the size of purie marbles.

  • The further we distance ourselves from the spell of the present, explored by our senses, the harder it will be to understand and protect nature's precarious balance, let alone the balance of our own human nature.

  • As a species, we've somehow survived large and small ice ages, genetic bottlenecks, plagues, world wars and all manner of natural disasters, but I sometimes wonder if we'll survive our own ingenuity.

  • My mother always said I must be part Mongolian because of my lotus-pale complexion and squid-ink black hair.

  • I don't want to get to the end of my life and find that I lived just the length of it. I want to have lived the width of it as well.

  • We ogle plants and animals up close on television, the Internet and in the movies. We may not worship the animals we see, but we still regard them as necessary physical and spiritual companions. Technological nature can't completely satisfy that yearning.

  • We embrace two-legged beings, and can warm to four-legged beings, too, but for most people, six legs is pushing it. Most don't need multi-eyed, antennaed face time.

  • In the winter, I enjoy cross-country skiing and raising orchids and amaryllises. If I could grow tropical flowers as perennials, I would, especially hibiscus and mandavilla.

  • I've always found it best to have a routine. I go to my study at the same time every day and climb into my bay window. I may not be inspired every day, but on the days I am, I need to be in place to write. If I'm not particularly inspired, I'll revise or do research or correspondence.

  • We try to exile ourselves more and more from nature - not always consciously: We build houses; we dismiss nature; nature has to be outside, because we're inside. God forbid something like a cockroach comes inside, or some dust.

  • We tend to think of heroes only in terms of violent combat, whether it's against enemies or a natural disaster. But human beings also perform radical acts of compassion; we just don't talk about them, or we don't talk about them as much.

  • The simple, stupefying truth that, as a woman, I am a minute ocean, in the dark tropic of whose womb eggs lay coded as roe, floating in the sea that wet-nursed us all, moved me deeply.

  • Success produces success, just as money produces money.

  • I'm fascinated how often and with what whole-heartedness people will risk their lives to perform acts of courage, sacrifice, and compassion for total strangers.

  • Like many animals, wild ponies can sense a drop in barometric pressure. When a storm threatens, they know to seek shelter in hilly areas and huddle together with their rumps facing the oncoming wind.

  • A poem records emotions and moods that lie beyond normal language, that can only be patched together and hinted at metaphorically.

  • Artificial intelligence is growing up fast, as are robots whose facial expressions can elicit empathy and make your mirror neurons quiver.

  • Suffering took hold of me like a magic spell abolishing all differences between friends and strangers.

  • Couples are jigsaw puzzles that hang together by touching in just enough points. They're never total fits or misfits. We marry children who have grown up and still rejoice in being children .[p. 15]

  • I'm an Earth ecstatic, and my creed is simple: All life is sacred, life loves life, and we are capable of improving our behavior toward one another. As basic as that is, for me it's also tonic and deeply spiritual, glorifying the smallest life-form and embracing the most distant stars.

  • I'm an Earth ecstatic, and my creed is simple: All life is sacred, life loves life, and we are capable of improving our behavior toward one another. As basic as that is, for me it's also tonic and deeply spiritual, glorifying the smallest life-form and embracing the most distant stars."

  • Below us somewhere in the gelatinous phantasmagoria of churning blue, the whales wouldn't be much aware of the storm."

  • I believe consciousness is brazenly physical, a raucous mirage the brain creates to help us survive. But I also sense the universe is magical, greater than the sum of its parts, which I don't attribute to a governing god, but simply to the surprising, ecstatic, frightening everyday reality we all know. Ultimately, I find consciousness a fascinating predicament for matter to get into."

  • No matter how politely one says it, we owe our existence to the farts of blue-green algae.

  • ...for most people in the [Jewish] Ghetto [of Warsaw] nature lived only in memory -- no parks, birds, or greenery existed in the Ghetto -- and they suffered the loss of nature like a phantom-limb pain, an amputation that scrambled the body's rhythms, starved the senses, and made basic ideas about the world impossible for children to fathom.

  • A flower's fragrance declares to all the world that it is fertile, available, and desirable, its sex organs oozing with nectar. Its smell reminds us in vestigial ways of fertility, vigor, life-force, all the optimism, expectancy, and passionate bloom of youth. We inhale its ardent aroma and, no matter what our ages, we feel young and nubile in a world aflame with desire.

  • For better or worse, zoos are how most people come to know big or exotic animals. Few will ever see wild penguins sledding downhill to sea on their bellies, giant pandas holding bamboo lollipops in China or tree porcupines in the Canadian Rockies, balled up like giant pine cones.

  • When I go biking, I am mentally far far away from civilization. The world is breaking someone else's heart.

  • So before I start work on a book, I'm like a pregnant mole - I obsessively tidy and order my closets and everything in my study. Because there's such a cascade of images and ideas that I'm grapping with mentally, I couldn't also be in a chaotic setting.

  • Everyone admits that love is wonderful and necessary, yet no one agrees on just what it is.

  • Words are such small things, like confetti in the brain, and yet they are color and clarify everything, they can stain the mind or warp the feelings.

  • Nature is more like a seesaw than a crystal, a never-ending conga line of bold moves and corrections.

  • Poetry is an act of distillation. It takes contingency samples, is selective. It telescopes time. It focuses what most often floods past us in a polite blur.

  • Devising a vocabulary for gardening is like devising a vocabulary for sex. There are the correct Latin names, but most people invent euphemisms. Those who refer to plants by Latin name are considered more expert, if a little pedantic.

  • One can live at a low flame. Most people do. For some, life is an exercise in moderation (best china saved for special occasions), but given something like death, what does it matter if one looks foolish now and then, or tries too hard, or cares too deeply?

  • Who would deduce the dragonfly from the larva, the iris from the bud, the lawyer from the infant? ...We are all shape-shifters and magical reinventors. Life is really a plural noun, a caravan of selves.

  • Smell brings to mind... a family dinner of pot roast and sweet potatoes during a myrtle-mad August in a Midwestern town. Smells detonate softly in our memory like poignant land mines hidden under the weedy mass of years.

  • When I set a glass prism on a windowsill and allow the sun to flood through it, a spectrum of colors dances on the floor. What we call "white" is a rainbow of colored rays packed into a small space. The prism sets them free. Love is the white light of emotion.

  • Words are small shapes in the gorgeous chaos of the world.

  • To begin to understand the gorgeous fever that is consciousness, we must try to understand the senses and what they can tell us about the ravishing world we have the privilege to inhabit.

  • If a mind is just a few pounds of blood, urea, and electricity, how does it manage to contemplate itself, worry about its soul, do time-and-motion studies, admire the shy hooves of a goat, know that it will die, enjoy all the grand and lesser mayhems of the heart ?

  • The brain is only three pounds of blood, dream, and electricity, and yet from that mortal stew come Beethoven's sonatas. Dizzie Gillespie's jazz. Audrey Hepburn's wish to spend the last month of her life in Somalia, saving children.

  • We humans are obsessed with lights...Perhaps it is our way of hurling the constellations back at the sky.

  • Couples are jigsaw puzzles that hang together by touching in just enough points.

  • Couples are jigsaw puzzles that hang together by touching in just enough points. They're never total fits or misfits. In time, a pair invents its own commonwealth, complete with anthems, rituals, and lingos-a cult of two with fallible gods.

  • Don't just live the length of your life - live the width of it as well.

  • Look in the mirror. The face that pins you with its double gaze reveals a chastening secret.

  • I don't want to be a passenger in my own life.

  • Love is the great intangible. ... Frantic and serene, vigilant and calm, wrung-out and fortified, explosive and sedate -- love commands a vast army of moods. Hoping for victory, limping from the latest skirmish, lovers enter the arena once again. ... Love is the white light of emotion. ... Everyone admits that love is wonderful and necessary, yet no one can agree on what it is.

  • ... love is an act of sedition, a revolt against reason, an uprising in the body politic, a private mutiny.

  • It began in mystery, and it will end in mystery, but what a savage and beautiful country lies in between.

  • An occasion, catalyst, or tripwire?permits the poet to reach into herself and haul up whatever nugget of the human condition distracts her at the moment, something that can't be reached in any other way.

  • Wonder is the heaviest element on the periodic table. Even a tiny fleck of it stops time.

  • If we mammals don't get something to eat every day or two, our temperature drops, all our signs fall off, and we begin to starve. Living at biological red alert, it's not surprising how obsessed we are with food; I'm just amazed we don't pace and fret about it all the time.

  • I'm certainly not opposed to digital technology, whose graces I daily enjoy and rely on in so many ways. But I worry about our virtual blinders.

  • Because IQ tests favor memory skills and logic, overlooking artistic creativity, insight, resiliency, emotional reserves, sensory gifts, and life experience, they can't really predict success, let alone satisfaction.

  • Not much is known about alligators. They don't train well. And they're unwieldy and rowdy to work with in laboratories.

  • Out of the blue, Paul reported feeling bouts of calm euphoria, a mystical sense of all's-right-with-his-life-and-the-universe, a bright future in sight. ... I knew well the state of vigorous calm he meant, a frequent visitor throughout my own life. [p. 290]

  • When I set a glass prism on a windowsill and allow the sun to flood through it, a spectrum of colors dances on the floor. What we call white is a rainbow of colored rays packed into a small space. The prism sets them free. Love is the white light of emotion.

  • For if I do something, I never do it thoughtlessly.

  • Alligators have beautiful undulating skin, which feels dense, spongy, solid, like the best eraser.

  • Our mistakes are legion, but our talent is immeasurable.

  • The garden is a living, pulsing, singing, scratching, warring, erotic, and generally rowdy thing. I may find peace in its midst, but I regard it as a whole with many parts, a plural organism.

  • When all is said and done, we exist only in relation to the world, and our senses evolved as scouts who bridge that divide and provide volumes of information, warnings and rewards.

  • Despite not knowing if what he felt from moment to moment would pass or last forever, he entered fully into his shifting states of violent rage, self-pity, longing, heartbreak, cynicism, without losing the ability to think about what was happening to him. That took courage, I thought, living with the suffering in a mindful way, as an artifact of being, neither good nor bad.

  • Hit a tripwire of smell and memories explode all at once. A complex vision leaps out of the undergrowth.

  • Touch seems to be as essential as sunlight.

  • Poetry reminds us of the truths about life and human nature that we knew all along, but forgot somehow because they weren't yet in memorable language.

  • Love is like a batik created from many emotional colors, it is a fabric whose pattern and brightness may vary.

  • There's no place you can go on the prairie that you don't hear the white noise of the wind, steady and rough as surf curling along a non-existant shore.

  • Living with anyone for many years takes skill. To keep peace in the household, couples learn to adapt to one another, hopefully in positive ways.

  • Hurricane season brings a humbling reminder that, despite our technologies, most of nature remains unpredictable.

  • Habitats keep evolving new pageants of species, and we shouldn't interfere.

  • We live on the leash of our senses.

  • Though not a natural world by any means, more like a collection of living dioramas, a zoo exists in its own time zone, somewhere between the seasonal sense of animals and our madly ticking watch time.

  • Brain scans show synchrony between the brains of mother and child; but what they can't show is the internal bond that belongs to neither alone, a fusion in which the self feels so permeable it doesn't matter whose body is whose.

  • Even without seeing the crickets, grasshoppers, cicadas and katydids, we hear them shrilling in this season and trust that they're the tiny living gargoyles entomologists claim.

  • I consider fiction a very high-class form of lying. I enjoy and admire it enormously, but I don't think I'm very good at it.

  • I swear I will not dishonor my soul with hatred, but offer myself humbly as a guardian of nature, as a healer of misery, as a messenger of wonder, as an architect of peace.

  • We live on the leash of our senses. There is no way in which to understand the world without first detecting it through the radar-net of our senses.

  • Human beings are sloshing sacks of chemicals on the move.

  • The senses don't just make sense of life in bold or subtle acts of clarity, they tear reality apart into vibrant morsels and reassemble them into a meaningful pattern.

  • Look at your feet. You are standing in the sky. When we think of the sky, we tend to look up, but the sky actually begins at the earth. We walk through it, yell into it, rake leaves, wash the dog, and drive cars in it. We breathe it deep within us. With every breath, we inhale millions of molecules of sky, heat them briefly, and then exhale them back into the world.

  • The heart is a museum, filled with the exhibits of a lifetime's loves.

  • American writer 1803-1882 Play is our brain's favorite way of learning.

  • Above all, we ask the poet to teach us a way of seeing...

  • Give a man enough rope and he'll wrap himself around your little finger.

  • Nothing is more memorable than a smell. One scent can be unexpected, momentary and fleeting, yet conjure up a childhood summer beside a lake in the mountains; another, a moonlit beach; a third, a family dinner of pot roast and sweet potatoes during a myrtle-mad August in a Midwestern town. Smells detonate softly in our memory like poignant land mines hidden under the weedy mass of years. Hit a tripwire of smell and memories explode all at once. A complex vision leaps out of the undergrowth.

  • I am a great fan of the universe, which I take literally: as one. All of it interests me, and it interests me in detail.

  • [On gardens:] I think they're sanctuaries for the mind and spirit. ... It's easy to feel wonder-struck in a garden, especially if you cultivate delight.

  • When I go biking, I repeat a mantra of the day's sensations: bright sun, blue sky, warm breeze, blue jay's call, ice melting and so on. This helps me transcend the traffic, ignore the clamorings of work, leave all the mind theaters behind and focus on nature instead. I still must abide by the rules of the road, of biking, of gravity. But I am mentally far away from civilization. The world is breaking someone else's heart.

  • Nature is also great fun. To pretend that nature isn't fun is to miss much of the joy of being alive.

  • We would lie on coral sand, below sugary stars, watching Cassiopeia mount her throne and the Great Bear wash its paws in the South. I would say, "I have a secret to tell you." And, folding me in your arms, boyish and sly, you would answer: "Whisper it into my mouth.

  • Variety is the pledge that matter makes to living things.

  • Wonder is a bulky emotion. When you let it fill your heart and mind, there isn't room for anxiety, distress or anything else.

  • People search for love as if it were a city lost beneath the desert dunes, where pleasure is the law, the streets are lined with brocade cushions, and the sun never sets.

  • A kiss is like singing into someone's mouth.

  • Look at your feet. You are standing in the sky. When we think of the sky, we tend to look up, but the sky actually begins at the earth.

  • Because poets feel what we're afraid to feel, venture where we're reluctant to go, we learn from their journeys without taking the same dramatic risks.

  • Look in the mirror. The face that pins you with its double gaze reveals a chastening secret. You are looking into a predator's eyes. Most predators have eyes set right on the front of their heads, so they can use binocular vision to sight and track their prey. ... Prey, on the other hand, have eyes at the sides of their heads, because what they really need is peripheral vision, so they can tell when something is sneaking up behind them. Something like us.

  • poetry had everything to teach me about life.

  • Symbolic of life, hair bolts from our head[s]. Like the earth, it can be harvested, but it will rise again. We can change its color and texture when the mood strikes us, but in time it will return to its original form, just as Nature will in time turn our precisely laid-out cities into a weed-way.

  • In our heart we know that life loves life. Yet we feast on some of the other life-forms with which we share our planet; we kill to live. Taste is what carries us across that rocky moral terrain, what makes the horror palatable, and the paradox we could not defend by reason melts into a jungle of sweet temptations.

  • Libraries change lives. They are the soul of a people.

  • The visual image is a kind of tripwire for the emotions.

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