Diane Ackerman Quotes

129 quotes in 2186 categories

• Happiness doesn't require laughter, only well-being and a sense that the world is breaking someone else's heart, not mine.
• The heart is a museum, filled with the exhibits of a lifetime's loves.
• Devising a vocabulary for gardening is like devising a vocabulary for sex. There are the correct Latin names, but most people invent euphemisms. Those who…
• 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,…
• I am a great fan of the universe, which I take literally: as one. All of it interests me, and it interests me in detail.
• Writing is my form of celebration and prayer.
• Look at your feet. You are standing in the sky. When we think of the sky, we tend to look up, but the sky actually…
• I try to give myself passionately, totally, to whatever I'm observing, with as much affectionate curiosity as I can muster, as a means of understanding…
• 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 of…
• Smell brings to mind... a family dinner of pot roast and sweet potatoes during a myrtle-mad August in a Midwestern town. Smells detonate softly in…
• We humans are obsessed with lights...Perhaps it is our way of hurling the constellations back at the sky.
• When I go biking, I am mentally far far away from civilization. The world is breaking someone else's heart.
• Words are small shapes in the gorgeous chaos of the world. ... they bring the world into focus, they corral ideas, they hone thoughts, they…
• Love, like truth, is the unassailable defense.
• Mystery causes a mental itch, which the brain tries to soothe with the balm of reasonable talk.
• Complexity excites the mind, and order rewards it. In the garden, one finds both, including vanishingly small orders too complex to spot, and orders so…
• In the early years of the Uprising, we survived on one meal a day of horse meat and soup, but by the end we ate…
• A life like an intricately woven basket, frayed, worn, broken, unraveled, reworked, reknit from many of its original pieces... Life can survive in the constant…
• 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.…
• What an odd, ruminating, noisy, self-interrupting conversation we conduct with ourselves from birth to death.

Browse Diane Ackerman Quotes by Category