Diane Ackerman Quotes
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.
Quotes to Explore
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With me poetry has not been a purpose, but a passion.
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I tend to be the type who is overly polite and sort of ingratiating to other people.
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I grew up in this town, my poetry was born between the hill and the river, it took its voice from the rain, and like the timber, it steeped itself in the forests.
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In the past, TSR and now Wizards of the Coast have asked me to do game stats for my characters, and I'm never comfortable doing that. It's all relative after all.
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I'm so suspicious of our own understanding of the past. I just think that your mind plays absolute tricks on you and fools you every minute of every day. And so when you're talking about the past, you're talking about something that never happened. At least it didn't happen the way you think it happened.
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The unrecorded past is none other than our old friend, the tree in the primeval forest which fell without being heard.
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Poetry is the elder sister of history, the mother of language, the ancestress of civilization.
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The Scottish Highlands are incredible. There seems to be magic and poetry everywhere.
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Poetry is the opening and closing of a door, leaving those who look through to guess about what is seen during the moment.
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Being able to compete for consumers' attention and dollars over the preciousness of access is a thing of the past. Everyone is using the Internet to globally market a product.
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The West has demonstrated its ability in the past to project power and move troops to distant regions.
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Poetry had far better imply things than preach them directly... in the open pulpit her voice grows hoarse and fails.
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The poetry I grew up on is really an intense form of poetry; it's so pure and powerful.
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My mother's belief in spiritual healers grew stronger after our family went through a rough patch following my father's death. Sufi saint Karimullah Shah Kadri changed our lives, and all of us converted to Sufism. But it wasn't an instantaneous decision - it took us 10 years to convert. The change in religion was like washing away the past.
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I believe in the power of poetry, which gives me reasons to look ahead and identify a glint of light.
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No verse is free for the man who wants to do a good job....Poetry..remains one person talking to another....no poet can write a poem of amplitude unless he is the master of the prosaic.
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The prophets... interpreted past history, shaped present history, and foretold future history on the basis of the conviction that God rules with righteousness in the affairs of nations, and that only what is just, and not what is expedient and profitable, shall endure.
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From another side: is Achilles possible with powder and lead? Or the Iliad with the printing press, not to mention the printing machine? Do not the song and saga of the muse necessarily come to an end with the printer's bar, hence do not the necessary conditions of epic poetry vanish?
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Life is always sad. That's what makes suicide so tempting because life is all that we really have and haven't. Death makes us equals, too, because the foul and the good all die. The past, the present, and the future-what escape is there from these? None-and yet sometimes we are life's happy victims.
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I missed the moment when time collapsed and memory was erased, replaced by finicky social experiments, lost in the blur of intoxication, sucked through multi-colored bendy-straws
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Philosophy is like a mother who gave birth to and endowed all the other sciences. Therefore, one should not scorn her in her nakedness and poverty, but should hope, rather, that part of her Don Quixote ideal will live on in her children so that they do not sink into philistinism.
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It is not enough to offer a smorgasbord of courses. We must insure that students are not just eating at one end of the table.
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I've always said that theater was where I began, so everything I do now has a bit of my theater background in it. It was my training.
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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.
