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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
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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
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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
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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.
Diane Ackerman
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Mystery causes a mental itch, which the brain tries to soothe with the balm of reasonable talk.
Diane Ackerman
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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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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Nature is also great fun. To pretend that nature isn't fun is to miss much of the joy of being alive.
Diane Ackerman
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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
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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
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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.
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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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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 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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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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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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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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Shaped a little like a loaf of French country bread, our brain is a crowded chemistry lab, bustling with nonstop neural conversations.
Diane Ackerman
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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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Suddenly, smoke billowed from underneath the bridge. No, not smoke but a column of bats.
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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.
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.
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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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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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