Diane Ackerman Quotes
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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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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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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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We ogle plants and animals up close on television, the Internet and in the movies. We may not worship the animals we see, but we still regard them as necessary physical and spiritual companions. Technological nature can't completely satisfy that yearning.
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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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The biggest threat to the religious experience may well come from organized religion itself.
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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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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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As fleeting emotions stalk it, a face can leak fear or the guilt of a forming lie.
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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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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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Of all the errands life seems to be running, of all the mysteries that enchant us, love is my favorite.
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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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There are well-dressed foolish ideas just as there are well-dressed fools.
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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