Diane Ackerman

poetry had everything to teach me about life.

— Diane Ackerman

The daftest logic brings such sweet unrest.

— Diane Ackerman

It's animal by animal that you save a species.

— Diane Ackerman

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

— Diane Ackerman

Horses have made civilization possible.

— Diane Ackerman

Choice is a signature of our species.

— Diane Ackerman

The visual image is a kind of tripwire for the emotions.

— Diane Ackerman

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

— Diane Ackerman

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

— Diane Ackerman

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

— Diane Ackerman

Nature is more like a seesaw than a crystal, a never-ending conga line of bold moves and corrections.

— Diane Ackerman

I believe consciousness is brazenly physical, a raucous mirage the brain creates to help us survive.

— Diane Ackerman

Hurricane season brings a humbling reminder that, despite our technologies, most of nature remains unpredictable.

— Diane Ackerman

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

— 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…

— Diane Ackerman

The more we exile ourselves from nature, the more we crave its miracle waters.

— Diane Ackerman

Couples are jigsaw puzzles that hang together by touching in just enough points. They're never total fits or misfits. In time, a…

— Diane Ackerman

I'm sure civilizations will still evolve through play, or rather as play, since that seems to be a fundamental mechanism of our…

— Diane Ackerman

“would escape to his own private planet, Ro, where an imaginary astronomer friend, Zi, had finally succeeded in building a machine to…

— Diane Ackerman

Complexity excites the mind, and order rewards it. In the garden, one finds both, including vanishingly small orders too complex to spot,…

— Diane Ackerman

“Couples are jigsaw puzzles that hang together by touching in just enough points. They're never total fits or misfits. ... We marry…

— Diane Ackerman

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

— Diane Ackerman

In the early years of the Uprising, we survived on one meal a day of horse meat and soup, but by the…

— Diane Ackerman

“Myself, I've always been organized in waves. For months on end, slowly descending into disorder, I drift with the status quo. Then…

— Diane Ackerman

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

— Diane Ackerman

“It's a funny thing," Jan went on, "she's not a child, she's not stupid, but her relationship with other people tends to…

— Diane Ackerman

“Revered as God's servants, the bees they lure provide mead and honey for the table and beeswax candles for church services, which…

— 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…

— Diane Ackerman

“How did he manage such feats of compassion while staying sane and creative? By stilling the mind and communing with nature: One…

— Diane Ackerman

Working from home meant we could vary snack and coffee breaks, change our desks or view, goof off, drink on the job,…

— Diane Ackerman

We think of it as a sort of traffic accident of the heart. It is an emotion that scares us more than…

— Diane Ackerman

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

— Diane Ackerman

“A caregiver is changed by the culture of illness, just as one is changed by the dynamic era in which one lives.…

— Diane Ackerman

“Michał Grynberg, ed., Words to Outlive Us: Eyewitness Accounts from the Warsaw Ghetto, trans. Philip Boehm (London: Granta Books, 2003), p. 46.…

— Diane Ackerman

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

— Diane Ackerman

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

— Diane Ackerman

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

— Diane Ackerman

“The Poles claim Korczak as a martyr, and the Israelis revere him as one of the Thirty-Six Just Men, whose pure souls…

— Diane Ackerman

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

— Diane Ackerman

“Love is the great intangible. In our nightmares, we can create beasts out of pure emotion. Hate stalks the streets with dripping…

— Diane Ackerman