Diane Ackerman Quotes
-
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 kiss is like singing into someone's mouth.
-
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.
-
I hate the fearful trimming of possibilities that age brings.
-
Like love, travel makes you innocent again.
-
We are defined by how we place our attention.
-
The knowing, I told myself, is only a vapor of the mind, and yet it can wreck havok with one's sanity.
-
We live on the leash of our senses. There is no way in which to understand the world without first detecting it through the radar-net of our senses.
-
For the longest time I didn't realize I was creative - I just thought I was strange.
-
Culture is what people invent when they have lost nature.
-
Horses have made civilization possible.
-
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.
-
There was nothing to do but wait. It is always like this for naturalists, and for poets--the long hours of travel and preparation, and then the longer hours of waiting. All for that one electric, pulse-revving vision when the universe suddenly declares itself.
-
Words are small shapes in the gorgeous chaos of the world.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Happiness doesn't require laughter, only well-being and a sense that the world is breaking someone else's heart, not mine.
-
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 well of nature is full today. Time to go outside and take a drink.
-
For me, life offers so many complexly appealing moments that two beautiful objects may be equally beautiful for different reasons and at different times. How can one choose?
-
All relationships change the brain - but most important are the intimate bonds that foster or fail us, altering the delicate circuits that shape memories, emotions and that ultimate souvenir, the self.
-
Who would deduce the dragonfly from the larva, the iris from the bud, the lawyer from the infant? ...We are all shape-shifters and magical reinventors. Life is really a plural noun, a caravan of selves.
-
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.
-
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.