-
Nature is more like a seesaw than a crystal, a never-ending conga line of bold moves and corrections.
Diane Ackerman -
As people flock to urban centers where ground space is limited, cities with green walls and roofs and skyscraper farms offer improved health and well-being, renewable resources, reliable food supply, and relief to the environment.
Diane Ackerman
-
In rare moments of deep play, we can lay aside our sense of self, shed time's continuum, ignore pain, and sit quietly in the absolute present, watching the world's ordinary miracles. No mind or heart hobbles. No analyzing or explaining. No questing for logic. No promises. No goals. No relationships. No worry. One is completely open to whatever drama may unfold.
Diane Ackerman -
Our sense of safety depends on predictability, so anything living outside the usual rules we suspect to be an outlaw, a ghoul.
Diane Ackerman -
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.
Diane Ackerman -
Touch seems to be as essential as sunlight.
Diane Ackerman -
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.
Diane Ackerman -
I'm sure civilizations will still evolve through play, or rather as play, since that seems to be a fundamental mechanism of our humanity.
Diane Ackerman
-
I don't want to be a passenger in my own life.
Diane Ackerman -
Flying has changed how we imagine our planet, which we have seen whole from space, so that even the farthest nations are ecological neighbors. It has changed our ideas about time. When you can gird the earth at 1,000 m.p.h., how can you endure the tardiness of a plumber? Most of all, flying has changed our sense of our body, the personal space in which we live, now elastic and swift. I could be in Bombay for afternoon tea if I wished. My body isn't limited by its own weaknesses; it can rush through space.
Diane Ackerman -
... love is an act of sedition, a revolt against reason, an uprising in the body politic, a private mutiny.
Diane Ackerman -
When I go biking, I repeat a mantra of the day's sensations: bright sun, blue sky, warm breeze, blue jay's call, ice melting and so on. This helps me transcend the traffic, ignore the clamorings of work, leave all the mind theaters behind and focus on nature instead. I still must abide by the rules of the road, of biking, of gravity. But I am mentally far away from civilization. The world is breaking someone else's heart.
Diane Ackerman -
Couples are jigsaw puzzles that hang together by touching in just enough points.
Diane Ackerman -
There is that unique moment when one confronts something new and astonishment begins.
Diane Ackerman
-
Part of the irony of environmentalism is questing for solutions when you know you're part of the problem.
Diane Ackerman -
Violets smell like burnt sugar cubes that have been dipped in lemon and velvet.
Diane Ackerman -
No matter how politely one says it, we owe our existence to the farts of blue-green algae.
Diane Ackerman -
Writer's block is a luxury most people with deadlines don't have.
Diane Ackerman -
The great affair, the love affair with life, is to live as variously as possible, to groom one's curiosity like a high-spirited thoroughbred, climb aboard, and gallop over the thick, sunstruck hills every day.
Diane Ackerman -
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
Diane Ackerman
-
We would lie on coral sand, below sugary stars, watching Cassiopeia mount her throne and the Great Bear wash its paws in the South. I would say, "I have a secret to tell you." And, folding me in your arms, boyish and sly, you would answer: "Whisper it into my mouth.
Diane Ackerman -
Variety is the pledge that matter makes to living things.
Diane Ackerman -
Mystery causes a mental itch, which the brain tries to soothe with the balm of reasonable talk.
Diane Ackerman -
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.
Diane Ackerman