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Life Quotes by Diane Ackerman

48 Life quotes by Diane Ackerman

All Life quotes Diane Ackerman’s page

The garden bursts with singing, scratching, and rowdy life, a wild classroom. We are shape‑shifters, constantly reinventing ourselves like dragonflies emerging from larvae. Choosing not to be a passenger, we design a good life together, even when the past cannot be reclaimed.

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

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Don't just live the length of your life - live the width of it as well.

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I don't want to be a passenger in my own life.

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poetry had everything to teach me about life.

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Which is crueler, an old man's lost memories of a life lived, or a young man's lost memories of the life he…

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Poetry reminds us of the truths about life and human nature that we knew all along, but forgot somehow because they weren't…

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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…

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“I don't want to get to the end of my life and find that I have just lived the length of it.…

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“No matter how politely one says it, we owe our existence to the farts of blue-green algae.”

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Living with anyone for many years takes skill. To keep peace in the household, couples learn to adapt to one another, hopefully…

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For me, life offers so many complexly appealing moments that two beautiful objects may be equally beautiful for different reasons and at…

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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…

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Ecstasy is what everyone craves - not love or sex, but a hot-blooded, soaring intensity, in which being alive is a joy…

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“Marek Edelman in Krall, Shielding the Flame. After the war Edelman became a cardiologist, commenting that "when one knows death so well,…

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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…

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What is erotic? The acrobatic play of the imagination. The sea of memories in which we bathe. The way we caress and…

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“I will not dishonor my soul with hatred, but offer myself humbly as a guardian of nature, as a healer of misery,…

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Who would deduce the dragonfly from the larva, the iris from the bud, the lawyer from the infant? ...We are all shape-shifters…

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A life like an intricately woven basket, frayed, worn, broken, unraveled, reworked, reknit from many of its original pieces... Life can survive…

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“More broadly, the Nazis were ardent animal lovers and environmentalists who promoted calisthenics and healthy living, regular trips into the countryside, and…

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“Must be I find you tough and lusty as the life, all toil and tempo, finesse and plain fight, with values so…

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“When you consider something like death, after which (there being no news flash to the contrary) we may well go out like…

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“At some point, one asks, "Toward what end is my life lived?" A great freedom comes from being able to answer that…

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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…

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“The sensory misers will inherit the earth, but first they will make it not worth living on. When you consider something like…

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When you consider something like death, after which (there being no news flash to the contrary) we may well go out like…

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“Nearby, on the other side of the wall, life flowed on as usual, as yesterday, as always," one survivor wrote. "People, citizens…

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“In the rain forest, no niche lies unused. No emptiness goes unfilled. No gasp of sunlight goes untrapped. In a million vest…

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“Metaphor isn't just decorative language. If it were, it wouldn't scare us so much. . . . Colorful language threatens some people,…

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“I may enter a zone of transcendence, in which I marvel at all the accidents of fate, since the beginning of life…

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“That evening, as I watched the sunset’s pinwheels of apricot and mauve slowly explode into red ribbons, I thought: The sensory misers…

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“I don't want to get to the end of my life and find that I just lived the lenght of it. I…

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“I have one talent," he wrote, "and that is the capacity to be tremendously surprised, surprised at life, at ideas.”

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

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“Every day our life was full of thoughts of the horrible present, and even our own death.”

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“Suffering took hold of me like a magic spell abolishing all differences between friends and strangers.”

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

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“Our lives together, our duet, also continues to evolve, and even if we can’t go back to how it was, we’re designing…

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I don't want to get to the end of my life and find that I lived just the length of it. I…

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Life becomes a lot simpler for a creative person when he or she finds the routine that works best. ... get in…

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More by 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…

“Our lives together, our duet, also continues to evolve, and even if we can’t go back to how it was, we’re designing a good…

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

Horses have made civilization possible.

Look at your feet. You are standing in the sky. When we think of the sky, we tend to look up, but the sky…

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…

Though we marry as adults, we don't marry adults. We marry children who have grown up and still rejoice in being children, especially if…

Libraries change lives. They are the soul of a people.

“The etymology of the Hebrew word for prophet, navi, combines three processes: navach (to cry out), nava (to gush or flow), and navuv (to…

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…

Symbolic of life, hair bolts from our head[s]. Like the earth, it can be harvested, but it will rise again. We can change its…

“Most people know that 30 to 40 percent of the world's Jews were killed during World War II, but not that 80 to 90…

Choice is a signature of our species.

The further we distance ourselves from the spell of the present, explored by our senses, the harder it will be to understand and protect…

Culture is what people invent when they have lost nature.