Diane Ackerman - A natural history of love (1994)

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Everyone admits that love is wonderful and necessary, yet no one agrees on just what it is.

Diane Ackerman
People search for love as if it were a city lost beneath the desert dunes, where pleasure is the law, the streets are lined with brocade cushions, and the sun never sets.

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

Diane Ackerman
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
We think of it as a sort of traffic accident of the heart. It is an emotion that scares us more than cruelty, more than violence, more than hatred. We allow ourselves to be foiled by the vagueness of the word. After all, love requires the utmost vulnerability. We equip someone with freshly sharpened knives; strip naked; then invite him to stand close. What could be scarier?

Diane Ackerman
Habit, a particularly insidious thug who chokes passion and smothers love. Habit puts us on autopilot.

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

Diane Ackerman
The only and absolute perfect union of two is when a baby hangs suspended in its mother's womb, like a tiny madman in a padded cell, attached to her, feeling her blood and hormones, and moods play through its body, feeling her feelings.

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
Love is an act of sedition, a revolt against reason, an uprising in the body politic, a private mutiny.

Diane Ackerman
Hope and uncertainty [are] the twin ingredients necessary for romance to thrive.... Nothing begins with so much excitement and hope, or fails as often, as love.

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
An animal on a leash is not tamed by the owner. The owner is extending himself through the leash to that part of his personality which is pure dog, that part of him which just wants to eat, sleep, bark, hump chairs, wet the floor in joy, and drink out of a toilet bowl.

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
When art separates this thick tangle of feelings, love bares its bones.

Diane Ackerman