Diane Ackerman Quotes
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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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In the absence of touching and being touched, people of all ages can sicken and grow touched starved. Touch seems to be as essential as sunlight.
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Mystery causes a mental itch, which the brain tries to soothe with the balm of reasonable talk.
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Violets smell like burnt sugar cubes that have been dipped in lemon and velvet.
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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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As anyone who has received or dispensed psychotherapy knows, it's a profession whose mainspring is love. Nearly everyone who visits a therapist has a love disorder of one sort or another, and each has a story to tell - of love lost or denied, love twisted or betrayed, love perverted or shackled to violence. Broken attachments litter the office floors like pick-up sticks. People appear with frayed seams and spilling pockets.
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Words are small shapes in the gorgeous chaos of the world. ... they bring the world into focus, they corral ideas, they hone thoughts, they paint watercolors of perception.
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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.
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Our skin is what stands between us and the world.
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A life like an intricately woven basket, frayed, worn, broken, unraveled, reworked, reknit from many of its original pieces... Life can survive in the constant shadow of illness, and even rise to moments of rampant joy, but the shadow remains, and one has to make space for it.
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Adult bats don't weigh much. They're mainly fur and appetite.
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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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Working from home meant we could vary snack and coffee breaks, change our desks or view, goof off, drink on the job, even spend the day in pajamas, and often meet to gossip or share ideas. On the other hand, we bossed ourselves around, set impossible goals, and demanded longer hours than office jobs usually entail. It was the ultimate "flextime," in that it depended on how flexible we felt each day, given deadlines, distractions, and workaholic crescendos.
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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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Though most of us don't hunt, our eyes are still the great monopolists of our senses. To taste or touch your enemy or your food, you have to be unnervingly close to it. To smell or hear it, you can risk being further off. But vision can rush through the fields and up the mountains, travel across time, country, and parsecs of outer space, and collect bushel baskets of information as it goes. Animals that hear high frequencies better than we do
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Our sense of safety depends on predictability, so anything living outside the usual rules we suspect to be an outlaw, a ghoul.
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My mother always said I must be part Mongolian because of my lotus-pale complexion and squid-ink black hair.
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We're losing biodiversity globally at an alarming rate, and we need a cornucopia of different plants and animals, for the planet's health and our own.
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It's animal by animal that you save a species.
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I like handling newborn animals. Fallen into life from an unmappable world, they are the ultimate immigrants, full of wonder and confusion.
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Words are such small things, like confetti in the brain, and yet they are color and clarify everything, they can stain the mind or warp the feelings.
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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.
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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.
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I'm sure civilizations will still evolve through play, or rather as play, since that seems to be a fundamental mechanism of our humanity.