Diane Ackerman Quotes

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

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.

Ecstasy is what everyone craves - not love or sex, but a hot-blooded, soaring intensity, in which being alive is a joy and a thrill. That enravishment doesn't give meaning to life, and yet without it life seems meaningless.

The trend for rewilding our cities is growing. It's positive, it enlightens, it's widespread, and it helps. We need to retrofit and reimagine cities as planet-friendly citadels. They're our hives and reefs. Sea mussels aren't the only animals living in individual shells that are glued together.

What sort of stewards of the future planet will today's digital children be?

Fear is danger to your body, but disgust is danger to your soul.

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.

It's like having a head full of holes, in which the perfect repository of words have shamed themselves, he lamented.

Habit, a particularly insidious thug who chokes passion and smothers love. Habit puts us on autopilot.

As anyone who has received or dispensed psychotherapy knows, it's a profession whose mainspring is love. Nearly everyone who visits a therapist has a love disorder of one sort or another, and each has a story to tell - of love lost or denied, love twisted or betrayed, love perverted or shackled to violence. Broken attachments litter the office floors like pick-up sticks. People appear with frayed seams and spilling pockets.

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.

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.

He'd know about the role of mirror neurons in the brain, special cells in the premotor cortex that fire right before a person reaches for a rock, steps forward, turns away, begins to smile.Amazingly, the same neurons fire whether we do something or watch someone else do the same thing, and both summon similar feelings. Learning form our own mishaps isn't as safe as learning from someone else's, which helps us decipher the world of intentions, making our social whirl possible. The brain evolved clever ways to spy or eavesdrop on risk, to fathom another's joy or pain quickly, as detailed sensations, without resorting to words. We feel what we see, we experience others as self.

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

It's animal by animal that you save a species.

Marek Edelman in Krall, Shielding the Flame. After the war Edelman became a cardiologist, commenting that "when one knows death so well, one has more responsibility for life." Chapter

We can't enchant the world, which makes its own magic; but we can enchant ourselves by paying deep attention

As the most social apes, we inhabit a mirror-world in which every important relationship, whether with spouse, friend or child, shapes the brain, which in turn shapes our relationships.

Love seems to be as Essential as Sunlight

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.

Caregiving offers many fringe benefits, including the sheer sensory delight of nourishing and grooming, sharing, and playing. But caregiving does buttonhole you; you're stitched in one place ... Paul wasn't on a learning curve but seemed trapped in a circle. He's swoop forward only to loop back again and fall to earth.

I like handling newborn animals. Fallen into life from an unmappable world, they are the ultimate immigrants, full of wonder and confusion.

Our mistakes are legion, but our talent is immeasurable.

The Underground Peasant Movement adopted the slogan of "As little, as late, and as bad as possible," and set about sabotaging deliveries

It's not enough to do research from a distance. It's by living beside animals that you learn their behavior and psychology. On

and pleasure? What is it that I am tasting?' The most eloquent rabbi and writer of Hasidic mysticism, Abraham Joshua Heschel, left Warsaw in 1939 to become an important

Flying has changed how we imagine our planet, which we have seen whole from space, so that even the farthest nations are ecological neighbors. It has changed our ideas about time. When you can gird the earth at 1,000 m.p.h., how can you endure the tardiness of a plumber? Most of all, flying has changed our sense of our body, the personal space in which we live, now elastic and swift. I could be in Bombay for afternoon tea if I wished. My body isn't limited by its own weaknesses; it can rush through space.

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.

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

Without memories we wouldn't know who we are, how we once were, who we'd like to be in the memorable future. We are the sum of our memories.

One of the things I like best about animals in the wild is that they're always off on some errand. They have appointments to keep. It's only we humans who wonder what we're here for.

The knowing, I told myself, is only a vapor of the mind, and yet it can wreck havok with one's sanity.

What would dawn have been like, had you awakened? It would have sung through your bones. All I can do this morning is let it sing through mine.

The biggest threat to the religious experience may well come from organized religion itself.

Who you are isn't tied solely to what you say, even though it may feel that way to you now.

What do those of us who aren't tall, flawlessly sculpted adolescents do?
Answer: Console ourselves with how relative beauty can be ...
Thank heavens for the arousing qualities of zest, intelligence,
wit, curiosity, sweetness, passion, talent and grace.

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.

Sophie Hodorowicz Knab, Polish Customs, Traditions, and Folklore (New York: Hippocrene Books, 1996), p. 259. people

Germany's crime is the greatest crime the world has ever known, because it is not on the scale of History: it is on the scale of Evolution.

Of all the errands life seems to be running, of all the mysteries that enchant us, love is my favorite

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

Though we marry as adults, we don't marry adults. We marry children who have grown up and still rejoice in being children, especially if we're creative.

Each photograph is a magic lamp rubbed by the mind.

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.

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

Smell is the mute sense, the one without words.

We are defined by how we place our attention.

The more we exile ourselves from nature, the more we crave its miracle waters.

Happiness doesn't require laughter, only well-being and a sense that the world is breaking someone else's heart, not mine.

Variety is the pledge that matter makes to living things.

In September 2013, the panel of 209 lead authors and 600 contributing authors, from 39 nations, poring over 9,200 scientific publications, came to these landmark conclusions: global warming is "unequivocal," sea levels are rising, ice packs are melting, and if we continue at this pace we "will cause further warming and changes in all components of the climate." However, they added, we can slow the process down if we begin at once.

Every moment is great, we were taught, every moment s unique.

Love, like truth, is the unassailable defense.

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.

We ask the poet to reassure us by giving us a geometry of living, in which all things add up and cohere, to tell us how things buttress once another, circle round and intermelt.

An animal on a leash is not tamed by the owner. The owner is extending himself through the leash to that part of his personality which is pure dog, that part of him which just wants to eat, sleep, bark, hump chairs, wet the floor in joy, and drink out of a toilet bowl.

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.

I understood the therapists were trying to rebuild Paul's vocabulary, beginning wit the rudiments, but Paul found it taxing, boring, and disturbingly condescending. His loss of language didn't mean he was any less a grown-up with adult feelings, experiences, worries, and problems. [p. 144]

The only and absolute perfect union of two is when a baby hangs suspended in its mother's womb, like a tiny madman in a padded cell, attached to her, feeling her blood and hormones, and moods play through its body, feeling her feelings.

We have vexed and bothered every plant and every animal on every continent.

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.

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.

Perversion is the erotic form of hatred.

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.

Nature rarely wastes a winning strategy.

Choice is a signature of our species.

Weightlessness makes astronauts lose taste and smell in space. In the absence of gravity, molecules cannot be volatile, so few of them get into our noses deeply enough to register as odors. This is a problem for nutritionists designing space food.

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

A good strategy should dictate the right actions. Any action mustn't be impulsive, but analyzed along with all its possible outcomes. A solid plan always includes many backups and alternatives.

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

Adventure is not something you travel to find. It's something you take with you, or you're not going to find it when you arrive.

Insight roams the sea of the unconscious like the Loch Ness monster, a rumor whose wake occasionally becomes visible, but even then it's mystifying and scarcely believed.

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

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

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.

Five weeks in the hospital fled as if down a sinkhole into the middle of the earth ... Can waiting by definition slow, flash by? ... Time becomes even more elastic than usual
minutes can stretch for ages and days suddenly snap together. [p. 97]

Knee-deep in the cosmic overwhelm, I'm stricken
by the ricochet wonder of it all: the plain
everythingness of everything, in cahoots
with the everythingness of everything else.
- From Diffraction (for Carl Sagan)

Poetry had everything to teach me about life.

Listen, I'd rather lie naked in a plowed field under an incontinent horse for a week than have to read that paragraph again!

Working from home meant we could vary snack and coffee breaks, change our desks or view, goof off, drink on the job, even spend the day in pajamas, and often meet to gossip or share ideas. On the other hand, we bossed ourselves around, set impossible goals, and demanded longer hours than office jobs usually entail. It was the ultimate "flextime," in that it depended on how flexible we felt each day, given deadlines, distractions, and workaholic crescendos.

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

And yet, words are the passkeys to our souls. Without them, we can't really share the enormity of our lives.

Adult bats don't weigh much. They're mainly fur and appetite.

What is erotic? The acrobatic play of the imagination. The sea of memories in which we bathe. The way we caress and worship things with our eyes. Our willingness to be stirred by the sight of the voluptuous. What is erotic is our passion for the liveliness of life.

Why was it, she asked herself, that 'animals can sometimes subdue their predatory ways in only a few months, while humans, despite centuries of refinement, can quickly grow more savage than any beast.

We carry the ocean within us; our veins mirror the tides.

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.

Rescuers tended to be decisive, fast-thinking, risk-taking, independent, adventurous, openhearted, rebellious, and unusually flexible - able to switch plans, abandon habits, or change ingrained routines at a moment's notice. They tended to be nonconformists, and though many rescuers held solemn principles worth dying for, they didn't regard themselves as heroic.

I suppose I try to be a translator of sorts, striving to translate emotion and vision into words, to express the life force of animals and landscapes, to give them voice. I pore over the lustrous details of nature and human nature. How different is this from a monk devoting his life to an illuminated manuscript?

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.

There is that unique moment when one confronts something new and astonishment begins.

Writing is my form of celebration and prayer.

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.

In the early years of the Uprising, we survived on one meal a day of horse meat and soup, but by the end we ate only dried peas, dogs, cats and birds.

We live on the leash of our senses.

If an expectant mother stepped over a rope on the ground or under a clothesline, the umbilical cord would tangle during childbirth. Mothers-to-be should

History is an agreed-upon fiction.

one legend has it that Jews found Poland attractive because the country's name sounded like the Hebrew imperative po lin ("rest here").

Most people know that 30 to 40 percent of the world's Jews were killed during World War II, but not that 80 to 90 percent of the Orthodox community perished, among them many who had kept alive an ancient tradition of mysticism and meditation reaching back to the Old Testament world of the prophets.

Culture is what people invent when they have lost nature.