Diane Ackerman Quotes

129 Sourced Quotes

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
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
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
The senses don't just make sense of life in bold or subtle acts of clarity, they tear reality apart into vibrant morsels and reassemble them into a meaningful pattern.

Diane Ackerman
Bats eat so much food each evening that they have weighed in at as much as 50 percent heavier after one night's dining.

Diane Ackerman
No matter how politely one says it, we owe our existence to the farts of blue-green algae.

Diane Ackerman
Bats kept surging out, and soon four columns stretched miles across the sky. A few strays looped and fed near us, passing like shuttles through the weave of the trees. The night was noticeably free of insects, but that was no surprise. These bats would eat five thousand pounds of insects that one night alone.

Diane Ackerman
People search for love as if it were a city lost beneath the desert dunes, where pleasure is the law, the streets are lined with brocade cushions, and the sun never sets.

Diane Ackerman
We say dawn breaks, as if something were shattering, but what we mean is that waves of light crest over the earth.

Diane Ackerman
Nothing looks more contented than a resting alligator. The mouth falls naturally into a crumpled smile, the eyes half close in a sleepy sort of way.

Diane Ackerman
Fifteen billion years ago, when the Universe let rip and, in disciplined panic, Creation spewed mazy star-treacle and resin, shrinking balls of debut fire smoldered and glitched.

Diane Ackerman
Suddenly, smoke billowed from underneath the bridge. No, not smoke but a column of bats.

Diane Ackerman
As fleeting emotions stalk it, a face can leak fear or the guilt of a forming lie.

Diane Ackerman
Shaped a little like a loaf of French country bread, our brain is a crowded chemistry lab, bustling with nonstop neural conversations.

Diane Ackerman
I'm sure civilizations will still evolve through play, or rather as play, since that seems to be a fundamental mechanism of our humanity.

Diane Ackerman
Vibrant as an African trade-bead with bonechips in orbit round it, Jupiter floods the night's black scullery, all those whirlpools and burbling aerosols little changed since the solar-system began.

Diane Ackerman
If a mind is just a few pounds of blood, urea, and electricity, how does it manage to contemplate itself, worry about its soul, do time-and-motion studies, admire the shy hooves of a goat, know that it will die, enjoy all the grand and lesser mayhems of the heart ?

Diane Ackerman
When we think of science, we often picture arcane quests after minutiae, or efforts to explain underlying principles. But it's amazing that in a civilization as complex as ours, we are still engaged in Adam's task, the naming of animals.

Diane Ackerman
Things that live by night live outside the realm of 'normal' time and so suggest living outside the realm of good and evil, since we have moralistic feelings about time. Chauvinistic about our human need to wake by day and sleep by night, we come to associate night dwellers with people up to no good at a time when they have the jump on the rest of us and are defying nature, defying their circadian rhythms.

Diane Ackerman
Love is the most important thing in our lives, a passion for which we would fight or die, and yet we're reluctant to linger over its names. Without a supple vocabulary, we can't even talk or think about it directly.

Diane Ackerman
Not much is known about alligators. They don't train well. And they're unwieldy and rowdy to work with in laboratories.

Diane Ackerman
So often loneliness comes from being out of touch with parts of oneself. We go searching for those parts in other people, but there's a difference between feeling separate from others and separate from oneself.

Diane Ackerman
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
deeply?

Diane Ackerman
Although it may be a little odd to think of it as a form of armor, smell plays many crucial roles in an insect's life. It's similar to a telephone wire over which different kinds of messages can flow: threat, invitation, courtship; the where abouts of food; a call to arms; a password; a death knell; the trail home.

Diane Ackerman
Devising a vocabulary for gardening is like devising a vocabulary for sex. There are the correct Latin names, but most people invent euphemisms. Those who refer to plants by Latin name are considered more expert, if a little pedantic.

Diane Ackerman
When a whale sleeps, it slowly tumbles in any-old-crazy, end-over-end, sideways fashion, and may even bonk its head on the bottom.

Diane Ackerman
Mystery causes a mental itch, which the brain tries to soothe with the balm of reasonable talk.

Diane Ackerman
Knee-deep in the cosmic overwhelm, I'm stricken by the ricochet wonder of it all: the plain everythingness of everything, in cahoots with the everythingness of everything else.

Diane Ackerman
Much of life becomes background, but it is the province of art to throw buckets of light into the shadows and make life new again.

Diane Ackerman
Nature is also great fun. To pretend that nature isn't fun is to miss much of the joy of being alive.

Diane Ackerman