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Diane Ackerman Quotes
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We can't enchant the world, which makes its own magic; but we can enchant ourselves by paying deep attention
Diane Ackerman
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Our skin is what stands between us and the world.
Diane Ackerman
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Love is the best school, but the tuition is high and the homework can be painful.
Diane Ackerman
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The brain can hold an idea in its stockroom for years, occasionally checking to see if it has changed at all, revising it a little, and then putting it back on the shelf, taking it down again when it seems to have evolved like a lemur from its original form.
Diane Ackerman
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When I set a glass prism on a windowsill and allow the sun to flood through it, a spectrum of colors dances on the floor. What we call "white" is a rainbow of colored rays packed into a small space. The prism sets them free. Love is the white light of emotion.
Diane Ackerman
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There are truths that can only be learned when you're dancing in chains.
Diane Ackerman
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Poetry is an act of distillation. It takes contingency samples, is selective. It telescopes time. It focuses what most often floods past us in a polite blur.
Diane Ackerman
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After all, coffee is bitter, a flavor from the forbidden and dangerous realm.
Diane Ackerman
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When you kiss me,
jaguars lope through my knees;
when you kiss me, my lips quiver like bronze
violets; oh, when you kiss me.
Diane Ackerman
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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.
Diane Ackerman
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Who would drink from a cup when they can drink from the source?
Diane Ackerman
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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?
Diane Ackerman
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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
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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
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Of all the errands life seems to be running, of all the mysteries that enchant us, love is my favorite
Diane Ackerman
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Not much is known about alligators. They don't train well. And they're unwieldy and rowdy to work with in laboratories.
Diane Ackerman
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How shall I
celebrate the planet
that, even now, carries me
in its fruited womb?
Diane Ackerman
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For the longest time I didn't realize I was creative — I just thought I was strange.
Diane Ackerman
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We shelter under a warm net of kisses. We drink from the well of each other's mouth.
Diane Ackerman
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Language is a playing with words until they can impersonate physical objects and abstract ideas.
Diane Ackerman
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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
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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
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Flight is nothing but an attitude in motion.
Diane Ackerman
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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
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The biggest threat to the religious experience may well come from organized religion itself.
Diane Ackerman
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Quote of the day
Autumn burned brightly, a running flame through the mountains, a torch flung to the trees.
Faith Baldwin
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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