Diane Ackerman - A Natural History of the Senses (1990)

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It began in mystery, and it will end in mystery, but what a savage and beautiful country lies in between.

Diane Ackerman
Look in the mirror. The face that pins you with its double gaze reveals a chastening secret. You are looking into a predator's eyes. Most predators have eyes set right on the front of their heads, so they can use binocular vision to sight and track their prey.

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
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
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
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
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
There is a furnace in our cells, and when we breathe we pass the world through our bodies, brew it lightly, and turn it loose again, gently altered for having known us.

Diane Ackerman
Violets smell like burnt sugar cubes that have been dipped in lemon and velvet.

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
We shelter under a warm net of kisses. We drink from the well of each other's mouth.

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 is more memorable than a smell. One scent can be unexpected, momentary and fleeting, yet conjure up a childhood summer beside a lake in the mountains.

Diane Ackerman
After all, coffee is bitter, a flavor from the forbidden and dangerous realm.

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
Our skin is what stands between us and the world.

Diane Ackerman
Words are small shapes in the gorgeous chaos of the world.

Diane Ackerman
Hit a tripwire of smell and memories explode all at once. A complex vision leaps out of the undergrowth.

Diane Ackerman
Though most of us don't hunt, our eyes are still the great monopolists of our senses.

Diane Ackerman
To begin to understand the gorgeous fever that is consciousness, we must try to understand the senses and what they can tell us about the ravishing world we have the privilege to inhabit.

Diane Ackerman
There is no way in which to understand the world without first detecting it through the radar-net of our senses.

Diane Ackerman
Smell is the mute sense, the one without words.

Diane Ackerman
Each night the sunset surged with purple pampas-grass plumes, and shot fuchsia rockets into the pink sky, then deepened through folded layers of peacock green to all the blues of India and a black across which clouds sometimes churned like alabaster dolls. The visual opium of the sunset was what I craved.

Diane Ackerman