Diane Ackerman Quotes

129 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

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

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
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
Just because we have evolved minds that crave order doesn't mean that nature is orderly. Evolution is a sleeping watchdog. It is possible for us to disturb it, or it may wake on its own. Either way, expect commotion.

Diane Ackerman
At night I lie awake In the ruthless Unspoken, knowing that planets come to life, bloom, and die away, like day-lilies opening one after another in every nook and cranny of the Universe...

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
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
Long ago, Earth bunched its granite to form the continents, ground molar Alps and Himalayas, rammed Africa and Italy into Europe, gnashing its teeth, till mountain ranges buckled and churned, and oceans (salty once rivers bled flavor from the seasoned earth) gouged their kelpy graves. And the rest is history...

Diane Ackerman
The great affair, the love affair with life, is to live as variously as possible, to groom one's curiosity like a high-spirited thoroughbred, climb aboard, and gallop over the thick, sunstruck hills every day.

Diane Ackerman
A prowling holocaust keeling low in the sky heads westward for another milk run. The Sun never sets on the Mercurian empire: it only idles on each horizon and lurches back, broiling the same arc across the sky.

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
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
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
Astronauts returning from orbit have marveled at how little of human life can be seen from space — not the wars or political boundaries, not the cities or farms, not the subtleties of custom, adolescence, or love.

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

Diane Ackerman