Diane Ackerman Quotes
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Culture is what people invent when they have lost nature.
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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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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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I don't want to get to the end of my life and find that I lived just the length of it. I want to have lived the width of it as well.
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I hate the fearful trimming of possibilities that age brings.
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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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We are defined by how we place our attention.
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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.
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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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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.
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History is an agreed-upon fiction.
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The knowing, I told myself, is only a vapor of the mind, and yet it can wreck havok with one's sanity.
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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.
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Which is crueler, an old man's lost memories of a life lived, or a young man's lost memories of the life he meant to live?
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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?
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There are well-dressed foolish ideas just as there are well-dressed fools.
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Of all the errands life seems to be running, of all the mysteries that enchant us, love is my favorite.
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As fleeting emotions stalk it, a face can leak fear or the guilt of a forming lie.
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Above all, we ask the poet to teach us a way of seeing.
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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.
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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.
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Happiness doesn't require laughter, only well-being and a sense that the world is breaking someone else's heart, not mine.
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One can live at a low flame. Most people do. For some, life is an exercise in moderation (best china saved for special occasions), but given something like death, what does it matter if one looks foolish now and then, or tries too hard, or cares too