Quotes by Diane Ackerman

“Touch seems to be as essential as sunlight”

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

“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.”

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

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

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

“I dont 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.”

“I dont want to be a passenger in my own life”

“We live on the leash of our senses.”

Id suffered many losses in recent years after my father mother uncle aunt and cousin had all passed away. In her final years my mother often lamented that there was no one alive who had known her as a girl and I was starting to understand how spooked shed felt. I wasnt sure I could take any more abandonments. One succumbs so easily to mind spasms, worry spasms. [p. 95]

How can loves spaciousnessbe conveyed in the narrowconfines of one syllable?

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

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

Im 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 its also tonic and deeply spiritual, glorifying the smallest life-form and embracing the most distant stars.

At some point, one asks, Toward what end is my life lived? A great freedom comes from being able to answer that question. A sleeper can be decoyed out of bed by the sheer beauty of dawn on the open seas. Part of my job, as I see it, is to allow that to happen. Sleepers like me need at some point to rise and take their turn on morning watch for the sake of the planet, but also for their own sake, for the enrichment of their lives. From the deserts of Namibia to the razor-backed Himalayas, there are wonderful creatures that have roamed the Earth much longer than we, creatures that not only are worthy of our respect but could teach us about ourselves.

For me, life offers so many complexly appealing moments that two beautiful objects may be equally beautiful for different reasons and at different times. How can one choose?

I may enter a zone of transcendence, in which I marvel at all the accidents of fate, since the beginning of life on earth, that led to my genes being created and my standing in this particular garden in a contemplative and imagining mind. I’ve been reading recently how reflection evolved. what a fascinating solution to the rigors of survival…how amazing that a few basic ingredients- the same ones that form the mountains, plants, and rivers- when arranged differently and stressed could result in us.More and more of late, I find myself standing outside of life, with a sense of the human saga laid out before me. it is a private vision, balanced between youth and old age, a vision in which I understand how caught up in striving we humans get, and a little of why, and how difficult it is even to recognize, since it feels integral to our nature and is. but I find it interesting that, according to many religions, life and begins and ends in a garden.

Studies show that the IQ range of most creative people is surprisingly narrow, around 120 to 130. Higher IQs can perform certain kinds of tasks better--logic, feats of memory, and so on. But if the IQ is much higher or lower than that, the window of creativity closes. Nonetheless, for some reason we believe more is better, so people yearn for tip-top IQs, and that calls for bigger memories. A fast, retentive memory is handy, but no skeleton key for survival.

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.

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.