Diane Ackerman Quotes

129 Sourced Quotes

Who would drink from a cup when they can drink from the source?

Diane Ackerman
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?

Diane Ackerman
Poetry is a kind of attentiveness that permits one both the organized adventure of the nomad and the armchair security of the bank teller, a way of dabbling without being a dilettante.

Diane Ackerman
I'm an Earth ecstatic, and my creed is simple: All life is sacred, life loves life, and we are capable of improving our behavior toward one another. As basic as that is, for me it's also tonic and deeply spiritual, glorifying the smallest life-form and embracing the most distant stars.

Diane Ackerman
Of all the errands life seems to be running, of all the mysteries that enchant us, love is my favorite

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
How shall I
celebrate the planet
that, even now, carries me
in its fruited womb?

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

Diane Ackerman
There is a way of beholding nature that is itself a form of prayer.

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
People often ask me where they might go to find adventure. Adventure is not something you must travel to find, I tell them, it's something you take with you.

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
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
Human beings are sloshing sacks of chemicals on the move.

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
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
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 lunging waves shook froth from their mouths like runaway horses.

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

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

Diane Ackerman