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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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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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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Our image of happiness is indissolubly bound up with the image of the past.
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This duality can be pursued further and is related to a duality between past and future and the notions of control and knowledge. Thus we may have knowledge of the past but cannot control it; we may control the future but have no knowledge of it.
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And now, at half-past ten o'clock, I hear the cockerels crow in Hubbard's barns, and morning is already anticipated. It is the feathered, wakeful thought in us that anticipates the following day.
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It is scary to write - period - for me, but once you get past the idea that it's scary to write, I still can only be who I am. As a writer, my job, to me, is to expose myself - to really sort of dig in and find out who I am and then put it on the page.
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Man is concentric: you have to take fold after fold off of him before you get to the centre of his personality. You must get below his animal nature, habits, customs, affections, daily life, and sometimes go away down into the heart of the man, before you know what is really in him. But when you get into the last core of these concentric rings of personality you find a sense of the infinite-a consciousness of immortality linked to something higher and better.
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Clinton appears to be the sole holdout in the Obama administration in understanding the catastrophe caused by its foreign policy in Libya.
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Maybe climate change is a threat, and maybe climate change has been tarted up by climatologists trolling for research grant cash. It doesn't matter.
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We met with the poet Frank O'Hara, who was a link between Upper and Lower Bohemia, and who worked at the Museum of Modern Art, where we had hoped to do the readings.
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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.
