Diane Ackerman quotes
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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.
-- Diane Ackerman -
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.
-- Diane Ackerman -
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.
-- Diane Ackerman -
It began in mystery, and it will end in mystery, but what a savage and beautiful country lies in between.
-- Diane Ackerman -
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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.
-- Diane Ackerman -
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.
-- Diane Ackerman -
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.
-- Diane Ackerman -
Wonder is the heaviest element on the periodic table. Even a tiny fleck of it stops time.
-- Diane Ackerman -
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Success produces success, just as money produces money.
-- Diane Ackerman -
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 ?
-- Diane Ackerman -
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.
-- Diane Ackerman -
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.
-- Diane Ackerman -
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The heart is a museum, filled with the exhibits of a lifetime's loves.
-- Diane Ackerman -
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?
-- Diane Ackerman -
Love is like a batik created from many emotional colors, it is a fabric whose pattern and brightness may vary.
-- Diane Ackerman -
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?
-- Diane Ackerman -
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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.
-- Diane Ackerman -
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.
-- Diane Ackerman -
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.
-- Diane Ackerman -
Words are small shapes in the gorgeous chaos of the world.
-- Diane Ackerman -
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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.
-- Diane Ackerman -
When I go biking, I am mentally far far away from civilization. The world is breaking someone else's heart.
-- Diane Ackerman -
The idea of safety had shrunk into particles - one snug moment, then the next. Meanwhile, the brain piped fugues of worry and staged mind-theaters full of tragedies and triumphs, because unfortunately, the fear of death does wonders to focus the mind, inspire creativity, and heightens the senses. Trusting one's hunches only seems gamble if one has time for seem; otherwise the brain goes on autopilot and trades the elite craft of analysis for the best rapid insights that float up from its danger files and ancient bag of tricks.
-- Diane Ackerman -
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.
-- Diane Ackerman -
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Don't just live the length of your life - live the width of it as well.
-- Diane Ackerman -
I don't want to be a passenger in my own life.
-- Diane Ackerman -
Touch seems to be as essential as sunlight.
-- Diane Ackerman -
Much of life becomes background, but it is the province of art to throw buckets of light into the shadows and make life new again.
-- Diane Ackerman -
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The great affair, the love affair with life, is to live as variously as possible, to groom one's curiosity like a high-spirited thoroughbred, climb aboard, and gallop over the thick, sun-struck hills every day. Where there is no risk, the emotional terrain is flat and unyielding, and, despite all its dimensions, valleys, pinnacles, and detours, life will seem to have none of its magnificent geography, only a length. It began in mystery, and it will end in mystery, but what a savage and beautiful country lies in between.
-- Diane Ackerman -
We can't enchant the world, which makes its own magic; but we can enchant ourselves by paying deep attention
-- Diane Ackerman -
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.
-- Diane Ackerman -
Look in the mirror. The face that pins you with its double gaze reveals a chastening secret.
-- Diane Ackerman -
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Love is the best school, but the tuition is high and the homework can be painful.
-- Diane Ackerman -
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.
-- Diane Ackerman -
The visual image is a kind of tripwire for the emotions.
-- Diane Ackerman -
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.
-- Diane Ackerman -
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Libraries change lives. They are the soul of a people.
-- Diane Ackerman
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