Diane Ackerman Quotes

129 Sourced Quotes

It began in mystery, and it will end in mystery, but what a savage and beautiful country lies in between.

Diane Ackerman
Look in the mirror. The face that pins you with its double gaze reveals a chastening secret. You are looking into a predator's eyes. Most predators have eyes set right on the front of their heads, so they can use binocular vision to sight and track their prey.

Diane Ackerman
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.

Diane Ackerman
A hundred million monarchs migrate each year. Gliding, flapping, hitching rides on thermals like any hawk or eagle, they fly as far as four thousand miles and as high as two thousand feet, rivaling the great animal migrations of Africa, the flocking of birds across North America.

Diane Ackerman
As anyone who has received or dispensed psychotherapy knows, it's a profession whose mainspring is love. Nearly everyone who visits a therapist has a love disorder of one sort or another, and each has a story to tell - of love lost or denied, love twisted or betrayed, love perverted or shackled to violence. Broken attachments litter the office floors like pick-up sticks. People appear with frayed seams and spilling pockets.

Diane Ackerman
Imagine the brain, that shiny mound of being, that mouse-gray parliament of cells, that dream factory, that petit tyrant inside a ball of bone, that huddle of neurons calling all the plays, that little everywhere, that fickle pleasuredome, that wrinkled wardrobe of selves stuffed into the skull like too many clothes into a gym bag.

Diane Ackerman
The well of nature is full today. Time to go outside and take a drink.

Diane Ackerman
Part of the irony of environmentalism is questing for solutions when you know you're part of the problem.

Diane Ackerman
Whales navigate through a rich, complicated landscape at a stately pace, slow as zeppelins, majestic and alert.

Diane Ackerman
What an odd, ruminating, noisy, self-interrupting conversation we conduct with ourselves from birth to death.

Diane Ackerman
I believe consciousness is brazenly physical, a raucous mirage the brain creates to help us survive.

Diane Ackerman
There is a furnace in our cells, and when we breathe we pass the world through our bodies, brew it lightly, and turn it loose again, gently altered for having known us.

Diane Ackerman
Violets smell like burnt sugar cubes that have been dipped in lemon and velvet.

Diane Ackerman
If we mammals don't get something to eat every day or two, our temperature drops, all our signs fall off, and we begin to starve. Living at biological red alert, it's not surprising how obsessed we are with food; I'm just amazed we don't pace and fret about it all the time.

Diane Ackerman
Wonder is a bulky emotion. When you let it fill your heart and mind, there isn't room for anxiety, distress or anything else.

Diane Ackerman
The lunging waves shook froth from their mouths like runaway horses.

Diane Ackerman
One of the keystones of romantic love — and also of the ecstatic religion practiced by mystics — is the powerful desire to become one with the beloved.

Diane Ackerman
The biggest threat to the religious experience may well come from organized religion itself.

Diane Ackerman
For the longest time I didn't realize I was creative — I just thought I was strange.

Diane Ackerman
We shelter under a warm net of kisses. We drink from the well of each other's mouth.

Diane Ackerman
Language is a playing with words until they can impersonate physical objects and abstract ideas.

Diane Ackerman
I swear I will not dishonor my soul with hatred, but offer myself humbly as a guardian of nature, as a healer of misery, as a messenger of wonder, as an architect of peace.

Diane Ackerman
We tend to think of memories as monuments we once forged and may find intact beneath the weedy growth of years. But, in a real sense, memories are tied to and describe the present. Formed in an idiosyncratic way when they happened, they're also true to the moment of recall, including how you feel, all you've experienced, and new values, passions, and vulnerability. One never steps into the same stream of consciousness twice.

Diane Ackerman
Flight is nothing but an attitude in motion.

Diane Ackerman
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.

Diane Ackerman
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.

Diane Ackerman
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.

Diane Ackerman
Human beings are sloshing sacks of chemicals on the move.

Diane Ackerman
In imaginative envy, we idealize what we don't have. The act of yearning for something transmutes it from base metal into gold.

Diane Ackerman
There's no place you can go on the prairie that you don't hear the white noise of the wind, steady and rough as surf curling along a non-existant shore.

Diane Ackerman