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I believe consciousness is brazenly physical, a raucous mirage the brain creates to help us survive.
Diane Ackerman
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What an odd, ruminating, noisy, self-interrupting conversation we conduct with ourselves from birth to death.
Diane Ackerman
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Whales navigate through a rich, complicated landscape at a stately pace, slow as zeppelins, majestic and alert.
Diane Ackerman
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Part of the irony of environmentalism is questing for solutions when you know you're part of the problem.
Diane Ackerman
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The well of nature is full today. Time to go outside and take a drink.
Diane Ackerman
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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No matter how politely one says it, we owe our existence to the farts of blue-green algae.
Diane Ackerman
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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
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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
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We say dawn breaks, as if something were shattering, but what we mean is that waves of light crest over the earth.
Diane Ackerman
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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
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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.
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Suddenly, smoke billowed from underneath the bridge. No, not smoke but a column of bats.
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As fleeting emotions stalk it, a face can leak fear or the guilt of a forming lie.
Diane Ackerman
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Shaped a little like a loaf of French country bread, our brain is a crowded chemistry lab, bustling with nonstop neural conversations.
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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
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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
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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 ?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Quote of the day
Be a sinner and sin strongly, but more strongly have faith and rejoice in Christ.
Martin Luther
Diane Ackerman
Creative Commons
Born:
October 7, 1948
(age 75)
Bio:
Diane Ackerman is an American poet, essayist, and naturalist known for her wide-ranging curiosity and poetic explorations of the natural world.
Known for:
A Natural History of the Senses (1990)
The Zookeeper's Wife (2007)
The Human Age: The World Shaped by Us (2014)
Deep play (1999)
A natural history of love (1994)
Most used words:
life
love
find
sky
adventure
people
smell
wonder
eyes
form
sense
drink
feel
heart
nature
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