Diane Ackerman Quotes
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Though we marry as adults, we don't marry adults. We marry children who have grown up and still rejoice in being children, especially if we're creative.
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What an odd, ruminating, noisy, self-interrupting conversation we conduct with ourselves from birth to death.
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Because we can't escape our ancient hunger to live close to nature, we encircle the house with lawns and gardens, install picture windows, adopt pets and Boston ferns, and scent everything that touches our lives.
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I believe consciousness is brazenly physical, a raucous mirage the brain creates to help us survive.
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Culture is what people invent when they have lost nature.
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Our relationship with nature has changed radically, irreversibly, but by no means all for the bad. Our new epoch is laced with invention. Our mistakes are legion, but our talent is immeasurable.
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Living with anyone for many years takes skill. To keep peace in the household, couples learn to adapt to one another, hopefully in positive ways.
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Poetry reminds us of the truths about life and human nature that we knew all along, but forgot somehow because they weren't yet in memorable language.
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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. We walk through it, yell into it, rake leaves, wash the dog, and drive cars in it. We breathe it deep within us. With every breath, we inhale millions of molecules of sky, heat them briefly, and then exhale them back into the world.
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We humans are obsessed with lights...Perhaps it is our way of hurling the constellations back at the sky.
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Life is a thing that mutates without warning, not always in enviable ways. All part of the improbable adventure of being alive, of being a brainy biped with giant dreams on a crazy blue planet.
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I consider fiction a very high-class form of lying. I enjoy and admire it enormously, but I don't think I'm very good at it.
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Life becomes a lot simpler for a creative person when he or she finds the routine that works best. ... get in the habit of going through the routine every day, and on some of those days, you're going to be lucky and have done some good work. ... Go to your study, close the door, invent your confidence.
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Artificial intelligence is growing up fast, as are robots whose facial expressions can elicit empathy and make your mirror neurons quiver.
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For the longest time I didn't realize I was creative - I just thought I was strange.
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I hate the fearful trimming of possibilities that age brings.
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I try to give myself passionately, totally, to whatever I'm observing, with as much affectionate curiosity as I can muster, as a means of understanding a little better what being human is.
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I watched her face switch among the radio stations of memory
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Nature is also great fun. To pretend that nature isn't fun is to miss much of the joy of being alive.
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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.
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One of the things I like best about animals in the wild is that they're always off on some errand. They have appointments to keep. It's only we humans who wonder what we're here for.
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Like love, travel makes you innocent again.
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What is erotic? The acrobatic play of the imagination. The sea of memories in which we bathe. The way we caress and worship things with our eyes. Our willingness to be stirred by the sight of the voluptuous. What is erotic is our passion for the liveliness of life.
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Human beings are sloshing sacks of chemicals on the move.