Diane Ackerman Quotes
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There is that unique moment when one confronts something new and astonishment begins.
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For better or worse, zoos are how most people come to know big or exotic animals. Few will ever see wild penguins sledding downhill to sea on their bellies, giant pandas holding bamboo lollipops in China or tree porcupines in the Canadian Rockies, balled up like giant pine cones.
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Fear is danger to your body, but disgust is danger to your soul.
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Humans are the most successful invasives of all time.
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We're dabbling in eugenics all the time, breeding ideal crops to replace less aesthetic or nutritious or hardy varieties; leveling forests to graze cattle or erect shopping malls and condos; planting groves of a few familiar trees that homeowners and industries prefer.
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In Manhattan last month I heard a woman borrowing the jargon of junkies to say to another, 'Want to do some chocolate?'
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Love is the best school, but the tuition is high and the homework can be painful.
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When I go biking, I am mentally far far away from civilization. The world is breaking someone else's heart.
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Shaped a little like a loaf of French country bread, our brain is a crowded chemistry lab, bustling with nonstop neural conversations.Imagine the brain, that shiny mound of being, that mouse-gray parliament of cells, that dream factory, that petit tyrant inside a ball of bone, that huddle of neurons calling all the plays, that little everywhere, that fickle pleasuredome, that wrinkled wardrobe of selves stuffed into the skull like too many clothes into a gym bag.
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One of the keystones of romantic love - and also of the ecstatic religion practiced by mystics - is the powerful desire to become one with the beloved.
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Tranquillity hides in small spaces, and when found needs to be treasured, because you know it's a phantom that will slip away again.
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After all, coffee is bitter, a flavor from the forbidden and dangerous realm.
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In the early years of the Uprising, we survived on one meal a day of horse meat and soup, but by the end we ate only dried peas, dogs, cats and birds.
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Smell is the mute sense, the one without words.
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Disassociating, mindfulness, transcendence-whatever the label-it's a sort of loophole in our contract with reality, a form of self-rescue.
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The more we exile ourselves from nature, the more we crave its miracle waters.
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Devising a vocabulary for gardening is like devising a vocabulary for sex. There are the correct Latin names, but most people invent euphemisms. Those who refer to plants by Latin name are considered more expert, if a little pedantic.
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Our skin is what stands between us and the world.
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Violets smell like burnt sugar cubes that have been dipped in lemon and velvet.
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I don't want to be a passenger in my own life.
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...for most people in the Jewish Ghetto of Warsaw nature lived only in memory -- no parks, birds, or greenery existed in the Ghetto -- and they suffered the loss of nature like a phantom-limb pain, an amputation that scrambled the body's rhythms, starved the senses, and made basic ideas about the world impossible for children to fathom.
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Wonder is the heaviest element on the periodic table. Even a tiny fleck of it stops time.
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Not much is known about alligators. They don't train well. And they're unwieldy and rowdy to work with in laboratories.
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Adult bats don't weigh much. They're mainly fur and appetite.