Diane Ackerman Quotes
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Who you are isn't tied solely to what you say, even though it may feel that way to you now.
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The heart is a museum, filled with the exhibits of a lifetime's loves.
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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.
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For if I do something, I never do it thoughtlessly.
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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.
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Don't just live the length of your life - live the width of it as well.
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Love is like a batik created from many emotional colors, it is a fabric whose pattern and brightness may vary.
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The visual image is a kind of tripwire for the emotions.
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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.
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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.
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Hurricane season brings a humbling reminder that, despite our technologies, most of nature remains unpredictable.
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We have vexed and bothered every plant and every animal on every continent.
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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.
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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.
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Give a man enough rope and he'll wrap himself around your little finger.
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We evolved as creatures knitted into the fabric of nature, and without its intimate truths, we can find ourselves unraveling.
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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 ?
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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.
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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.
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There is that unique moment when one confronts something new and astonishment begins.
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habit, a particularly insidious thug who chokes passion and smothers love. Habit puts us on autopilot.
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It's essential to tailor rehab to what impassions someone. The brain gradually learns by riveting its attention-through endless repetitions.
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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.
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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.