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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.
Diane Ackerman -
Couples are jigsaw puzzles that hang together by touching in just enough points. They're never total fits or misfits. In time, a pair invents its own commonwealth, complete with anthems, rituals, and lingos-a cult of two with fallible gods.
Diane Ackerman
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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.
Diane Ackerman -
What a lonely species we are, searching for signals of life from other galaxies, adopting companion animals, visiting parks and zoos to commune with other beasts. In the process, we discover our shared identity.
Diane Ackerman -
Home is where the heart is, we say, rubbing the flint of one abstraction against another.
Diane Ackerman -
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.
Diane Ackerman -
Nothing reveals more about the inner life of a people than their arts.
Diane Ackerman -
My mother always said I must be part Mongolian because of my lotus-pale complexion and squid-ink black hair.
Diane Ackerman
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Poetry had everything to teach me about life.
Diane Ackerman -
We think of it as a sort of traffic accident of the heart. It is an emotion that scares us more than cruelty, more than violence, more than hatred. We allow ourselves to be foiled by the vagueness of the word. After all, love requires the utmost vulnerability. We equip someone with freshly sharpened knives; strip naked; then invite him to stand close. What could be scarier?
Diane Ackerman -
Complexity excites the mind, and order rewards it. In the garden, one finds both, including vanishingly small orders too complex to spot, and orders so vast the mind struggles to embrace them.
Diane Ackerman -
And yet, words are the passkeys to our souls. Without them, we can't really share the enormity of our lives.
Diane Ackerman -
We tend to think of memories as monuments we once forged and may find intact beneath the weedy growth of years. But, in a real sense, memories are tied to and describe the present. Formed in an idiosyncratic way when they happened, they're also true to the moment of recall, including how you feel, all you've experienced, and new values, passions, and vulnerability. One never steps into the same stream of consciousness twice.
Diane Ackerman -
In our heart we know that life loves life. Yet we feast on some of the other life-forms with which we share our planet; we kill to live. Taste is what carries us across that rocky moral terrain, what makes the horror palatable, and the paradox we could not defend by reason melts into a jungle of sweet temptations.
Diane Ackerman
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We try to exile ourselves more and more from nature - not always consciously: We build houses; we dismiss nature; nature has to be outside, because we're inside. God forbid something like a cockroach comes inside, or some dust.
Diane Ackerman -
What an odd, ruminating, noisy, self-interrupting conversation we conduct with ourselves from birth to death.
Diane Ackerman -
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.
Diane Ackerman -
In the winter, I enjoy cross-country skiing and raising orchids and amaryllises. If I could grow tropical flowers as perennials, I would, especially hibiscus and mandavilla.
Diane Ackerman -
So often loneliness comes from being out of touch with parts of oneself. We go searching for those parts in other people, but there's a difference between feeling separate from others and separate from oneself.
Diane Ackerman -
Shaped a little like a loaf of French country bread, our brain is a crowded chemistry lab, bustling with nonstop neural conversations.
Diane Ackerman
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The only and absolute perfect union of two is when a baby hangs suspended in its mother's womb, like a tiny madman in a padded cell, attached to her, feeling her blood and hormones, and moods play through its body, feeling her feelings.
Diane Ackerman -
Habitats keep evolving new pageants of species, and we shouldn't interfere.
Diane Ackerman -
I believe consciousness is brazenly physical, a raucous mirage the brain creates to help us survive.
Diane Ackerman -
It's animal by animal that you save a species.
Diane Ackerman