Diane Ackerman - Life Quotes

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

Diane Ackerman
Nothing reveals more about the inner life of a people than their arts.

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 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
I like handling newborn animals. Fallen into life from an unmappable world, they are the ultimate immigrants, full of wonder and confusion.

Diane Ackerman
A self is a frightening thing to waste, it's the lens through which one's whole life is viewed, and few people are willing to part with it, in death, or even imaginatively, in art.

Diane Ackerman
Who would deduce the dragonfly from the larva, the iris from the bud, the lawyer from the infant?...We are all shape-shifters and magical reinventors. Life is really a plural noun, a caravan of selves.

Diane Ackerman
Ecstasy is what everyone craves — not love or sex, but a hot-blooded, soaring intensity, in which being alive is a joy and a thrill. That enravishment doesn't give meaning to life, and yet without it life seems meaningless.

Diane Ackerman
What is erotic? The acrobatic play of the imagination. The sea of memories in which we bathe. The way we caress and worship things with our eyes. Our willingness to be stirred by the sight of the voluptuous. What is erotic is our passion for the liveliness of life.

Diane Ackerman
Life becomes a lot simpler for a creative person when he or she finds the routine that works best.... get in the habit of going through the routine every day, and on some of those days, you're going to be lucky and have done some good work.... Go to your study, close the door, invent your confidence.

Diane Ackerman
The brain is only three pounds of blood, dream, and electricity, and yet from that mortal stew come Beethoven's sonatas. Dizzy Gillespie's jazz. Audrey Hepburn's wish to spend the last month of her life in Somalia, saving children.

Diane Ackerman