Diane Ackerman Quotes
-
What would dawn have been like, had you awakened? It would have sung through your bones. All I can do this morning is let it sing through mine.
-
An occasion, catalyst, or tripwire?permits the poet to reach into herself and haul up whatever nugget of the human condition distracts her at the moment, something that can't be reached in any other way.
-
Nature neither gives nor expects mercy.
-
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.
-
We tend to think of heroes only in terms of violent combat, whether it's against enemies or a natural disaster. But human beings also perform radical acts of compassion; we just don't talk about them, or we don't talk about them as much.
-
I'm fascinated how often and with what whole-heartedness people will risk their lives to perform acts of courage, sacrifice, and compassion for total strangers.
-
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.
-
Nothing is more memorable than a smell. One scent can be unexpected, momentary and fleeting, yet conjure up a childhood summer beside a lake in the mountains; another, a moonlit beach; a third, a family dinner of pot roast and sweet potatoes during a myrtle – mad August in a Midwestern town. Smells detonate softly in our memory like poignant land mines hidden under the weedy mass of years. Hit a tripwire of c and memories explode all at once. A complex vision leaps out of the undergrowth.
-
Like love, travel makes you innocent again.
-
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.
-
On some summer days in New York City, the air hangs thickly visible, like the combined exhalations of eight million souls. Steam rising from vents underground makes you wonder if there isn't one giant sweat gland lodged beneath the city.
-
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.
-
A self is a frightening thing to waste, it's the lens through which one's whole life is viewed, and few people are willing to part with it, in death, or even imaginatively, in art.
-
The brain is only three pounds of blood, dream, and electricity, and yet from that mortal stew come Beethoven's sonatas. Dizzie Gillespie's jazz. Audrey Hepburn's wish to spend the last month of her life in Somalia, saving children.
-
The biggest threat to the religious experience may well come from organized religion itself.
-
Flight is nothing but an attitude in motion.
-
A flower's fragrance declares to all the world that it is fertile, available, and desirable, its sex organs oozing with nectar. Its smell reminds us in vestigial ways of fertility, vigor, life-force, all the optimism, expectancy, and passionate bloom of youth. We inhale its ardent aroma and, no matter what our ages, we feel young and nubile in a world aflame with desire.
-
Happiness doesn't require laughter, only well-being and a sense that the world is breaking someone else's heart, not mine.
-
Words are small shapes in the gorgeous chaos of the world.
-
Horses have made civilization possible.
-
The well of nature is full today. Time to go outside and take a drink.
-
Success produces success, just as money produces money.
-
When you consider something like death, after which (there being no news flash to the contrary) we may well go out like a candle flame, then it probably doesn't matter if we try too hard, are awkward sometimes, care for one another too deeply, are excessively curious about nature, are too open to experience, enjoy a nonstop expense of the senses in an effort to know life intimately and lovingly.
-
The knowing, I told myself, is only a vapor of the mind, and yet it can wreck havok with one's sanity.