Diane Ackerman Quotes

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

Touch seems to be as essential as sunlight.

Living with anyone for many years takes skill. To keep peace in the household, couples learn to adap...

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

The faint pink coating the treetops promised rippling buds, a sure sign of spring hastening in, righ...

When I set a glass prism on a windowsill and allow the sun to flood through it, a spectrum of colors...

Frantic and serene, vigilant and calm, wrung-out and fortified, explosive and sedate—love commands a...

Love is the great intangible. In our nightmares, we can create beasts out of pure emotion. Hate stal...

We live on the leash of our senses.

It began in mystery and it will end in mystery, but what a rare and beautiful country lies in betwee...

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 hav...

How can love's spaciousnessbe conveyed in the narrowconfines of one syllable?

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

I'm fascinated how often and with what whole-heartedness people will risk their lives to perform act...

Anticipating their calamity and fright when deportation day came (August 6, 1942) he [Henryk Goldszm...

Knee-deep in the cosmic overwhelm, I’m strickenby the ricochet wonder of it all: the plaineverything...

I've always loved scuba diving and the cell-tickling feel of being underwater, though it poses uniqu...

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

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

Who would deduce the dragonfly from the larva, the iris from the bud, the lawyer from the infant? .....

Artificial intelligence is growing up fast, as are robots whose facial expressions can elicit empath...

All relationships change the brain - but most important are the intimate bonds that foster or fail u...

We ogle plants and animals up close on television, the Internet and in the movies. We may not worshi...

Even without seeing the crickets, grasshoppers, cicadas and katydids, we hear them shrilling in this...

Nothing is more memorable than a smell. One scent can be unexpected, momentary and fleeting, yet con...

Why was it, she asked herself, that "animals can sometimes subdue their predatory ways in only a few...

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

Europe enjoyed a heritage of fairy tales alive with talking animals--some almost real, other delicio...

As fleeting emotions stalk it, a face can leak fear or the guilt of a forming lie.

At some point, one asks, "Toward what end is my life lived?" A great freedom comes from being able t...

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

Much more. We're joined at the heart.""Bad luck for you, I'm afraid. My ticker's pretty wonky.""Too ...

I'd suffered many losses in recent years after my father mother uncle aunt and cousin had all passed...

Couples are jigsaw puzzles that hang together by touching in just enough points. They're never total...

Listen, I'd rather lie naked in a plowed field under an incontinent horse for a week than have to re...

I was moving in a narrow range between busy distractedness and a pervasive sadness whose granules se...

One morning as I closed the cyclone-fence gate / to begin a slow drift / down to the cookhouse on fo...

Devising a vocabulary for gardening is like devising a vocabulary for sex. There are the correct Lat...

I may enter a zone of transcendence, in which I marvel at all the accidents of fate, since the begin...

Studies show that the IQ range of most creative people is surprisingly narrow, around 120 to 130. Hi...

Metaphor isn't just decorative language. If it were, it wouldn't scare us so much. . . . Colorful la...

We tend to think of memories as monuments we once forged and may find intact beneath the weedy growt...

I'm an Earth ecstatic, and my creed is simple: All life is sacred, life loves life, and we are capab...

I believe consciousness is brazenly physical, a raucous mirage the brain creates to help us survive....

Still, though no one is an island, most are peninsulas. Our lives wouldn't make sense without person...

The sensory misers will inherit the earth, but first they will make it not worth living on. When you...

For me, life offers so many complexly appealing moments that two beautiful objects may be equally be...

In our heart we know that life loves life. Yet we feast on some of the other life-forms with which w...

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

Symbolic of life, hair bolts from our head[s]. Like the earth, it can be harvested, but it will rise...