Top 100 Diane Ackerman Quotes
#2. Of all the errands life seems to be running, of all the mysteries that enchant us, love is my favorite
Diane Ackerman
#3. 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
#4. Although Mengele's subjects could be operated on without any painkillers at all, a remarkable example of Nazi zoophilia is that a leading biologist was once punished for not giving worms enough anesthesia during an experiment.
Diane Ackerman
#5. Variety is the pledge that matter makes to living things.
Diane Ackerman
#6. 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
#7. Our sense of safety depends on predictability, so anything living outside the usual rules we suspect to be an outlaw, a ghoul.
Diane Ackerman
#8. It's not enough to do research from a distance. It's by living beside animals that you learn their behavior and psychology. On
Diane Ackerman
#9. 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 a little better what being human is.
Diane Ackerman
#10. Habit, a particularly insidious thug who chokes passion and smothers love. Habit puts us on autopilot.
Diane Ackerman
#11. The further we distance ourselves from the spell of the present, explored by our senses, the harder it will be to understand and protect nature's precarious balance, let alone the balance of our own human nature.
Diane Ackerman
#12. Myself, I've always been organized in waves. For months on end, slowly descending into disorder, I drift with the status quo. Then I wake up one morning with a sudden compulsion to color-code my socks or stack them vertically.
Diane Ackerman
#13. 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 everything else.
- From Diffraction (for Carl Sagan)
Diane Ackerman
#14. Not much is known about alligators. They don't train well. And they're unwieldy and rowdy to work with in laboratories.
Diane Ackerman
#15. It's so acceptably easy for a woman not to strive too hard, not to be too adventure-crazed, not to take too many risks, not to enjoy sex with full candor ... It isn't seemly for a woman to have that much zest.
Diane Ackerman
#16. There is a way of beholding nature which is a form of prayer, a way of minding something with such clarity and aliveness that the rest of the world recedes. It ... gives the brain a small vacation.
Diane Ackerman
#17. The more we exile ourselves from nature, the more we crave its miracle waters.
Diane Ackerman
#20. 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
#21. What an odd, ruminating, noisy, self-interrupting conversation we conduct with ourselves from birth to death.
Diane Ackerman
#22. 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
#23. 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
#25. There's no place you can go on the prairie that you don't hear the white noise of the wind, steady and rough as surf curling along a non-existant shore.
Diane Ackerman
#26. Each photograph is a magic lamp rubbed by the mind.
Diane Ackerman
#28. Our mistakes are legion, but our talent is immeasurable.
Diane Ackerman
#29. As zookeepers, the Zabinskis understood both vigilance and predators; in a swamp of vipers, one planned every footstep. Shaped by the gravity of wartime, it wasn't always clear who or what could be considered outside or inside, loyal or turncoat, predator or prey.
Diane Ackerman
#30. We can't enchant the world, which makes its own magic; but we can enchant ourselves by paying deep attention
Diane Ackerman
#31. 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 life for us, in spite of everything.
Diane Ackerman
#32. Don't think of night as the absence of day; think of it as a kind of freedom. Turned away from our sun, we see the dawning of far flung galaxies. We are no longer sun blinded to the star coated universe we inhabit.
Diane Ackerman
#33. Wonder is the heaviest element on the periodic table. Even a tiny fleck of it stops time.
Diane Ackerman
#34. I like knowing that the further back one traces any lineage, the narrower the path grows, to the haunt of just a few shaggy ancestors, with luck on their side, little gizmos in their cells and a future storied with impulses and choices that will ultimately define them.
Diane Ackerman
#35. Five weeks in the hospital fled as if down a sinkhole into the middle of the earth ... Can waiting by definition slow, flash by? ... Time becomes even more elastic than usual
minutes can stretch for ages and days suddenly snap together. [p. 97]
Diane Ackerman
#36. There was nothing to do but wait. It is always like this for naturalists, and for poets
the long hours of travel and preparation, and then the longer hours of waiting. All for that one electric, pulse-revving vision when the universe suddenly declares itself.
Diane Ackerman
#37. Sometimes with a flutter of agitated worry that felt like a beetle was trapped inside my ribs. p. 90
Diane Ackerman
#38. Marek Edelman in Krall, Shielding the Flame. After the war Edelman became a cardiologist, commenting that "when one knows death so well, one has more responsibility for life." Chapter
Diane Ackerman
#39. I'm sure civilizations will still evolve through play, or rather as play, since that seems to be a fundamental mechanism of our humanity.
Diane Ackerman
#40. She's so sensitive, she's almost able to read their minds. . .. She becomes them. . .. She has a precise and very special gift, a way of observing and understanding animals that's rare, a sixth sense. . .. It's been this way since she was little." In
Diane Ackerman
#41. I understood the therapists were trying to rebuild Paul's vocabulary, beginning wit the rudiments, but Paul found it taxing, boring, and disturbingly condescending. His loss of language didn't mean he was any less a grown-up with adult feelings, experiences, worries, and problems. [p. 144]
Diane Ackerman
#42. Poetry is an act of distillation. It takes contingency samples, is selective. It telescopes time. It focuses what most often floods past us in a polite blur.
Diane Ackerman
#43. Without memories we wouldn't know who we are, how we once were, who we'd like to be in the memorable future. We are the sum of our memories.
Diane Ackerman
#44. 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 part with it, in death, or even imaginatively, in art.
Diane Ackerman
#45. Suffering took hold of me like a magic spell abolishing all differences between friends and strangers.
Diane Ackerman
#46. Hit a tripwire of smell and memories explode all at once. A complex vision leaps out of the undergrowth.
Diane Ackerman
#47. I've always loved scuba diving and the cell-tickling feel of being underwater, though it poses unique frustrations. Alone, but with others, you may share the same sights and feelings, but you can't communicate well.
Diane Ackerman
#48. I watched her face switch among the radio stations of memory
Diane Ackerman
#49. and pleasure? What is it that I am tasting?' The most eloquent rabbi and writer of Hasidic mysticism, Abraham Joshua Heschel, left Warsaw in 1939 to become an important
Diane Ackerman
#50. The trend for rewilding our cities is growing. It's positive, it enlightens, it's widespread, and it helps. We need to retrofit and reimagine cities as planet-friendly citadels. They're our hives and reefs. Sea mussels aren't the only animals living in individual shells that are glued together.
Diane Ackerman
#52. If we mammals don't get something to eat every day or two, our temperature drops, all our signs fall off, and we begin to starve. Living at biological red alert, it's not surprising how obsessed we are with food; I'm just amazed we don't pace and fret about it all the time.
Diane Ackerman
#53. Before annihilation comes an exile from Nature, and then only through wonder and transcendence, the Ghetto rabbi taught, may one combat the psychic disintegration of everyday life.
Diane Ackerman
#54. Libraries change lives. They are the soul of a people.
Diane Ackerman
#55. We embrace two-legged beings, and can warm to four-legged beings, too, but for most people, six legs is pushing it. Most don't need multi-eyed, antennaed face time.
Diane Ackerman
#56. On some summer days in New York City, the air hangs thickly visible, like the combined exhalations of eight million souls. Steam rising from vents underground makes you wonder if there isn't one giant sweat gland lodged beneath the city.
Diane Ackerman
#57. Sophie Hodorowicz Knab, Polish Customs, Traditions, and Folklore (New York: Hippocrene Books, 1996), p. 259. people
Diane Ackerman
#58. One can live at a low flame. Most people do. For some, life is an exercise in moderation (best china saved for special occasions), but given something like death, what does it matter if one looks foolish now and then, or tries too hard, or cares too
deeply?
Diane Ackerman
#59. Couples are jigsaw puzzles that hang together by touching in just enough points.
Diane Ackerman
#61. Not long ago the world looked on the dark ages with contempt for its brutality, yet here it is again, in full force, a lawless sadism unpolished by all the charms of religion and civilization." Sitting
Diane Ackerman
#62. I can't breathe," she said. "I feel like I'm drowning in a gray sea, like they're flooding the whole city, washing away our past and people, dashing everything from the face of the earth." Jammed
Diane Ackerman
#63. The visual image is a kind of tripwire for the emotions.
Diane Ackerman
#64. Living with anyone for many years takes skill. To keep peace in the household, couples learn to adapt to one another, hopefully in positive ways.
Diane Ackerman
#65. In Manhattan last month I heard a woman borrowing the jargon of junkies to say to another, 'Want to do some chocolate?'
Diane Ackerman
#66. They spend their whole lives yelling at the world and each other. They yell at their loved ones, they yell at their enemies, they yell at their dinner, they yell at the big bustling world.
Diane Ackerman
#67. So often loneliness comes from being out of touch with parts of oneself. We go searching for those parts in other people, but there's a difference between feeling separate from others and separate from oneself.
Diane Ackerman
#68. Like many animals, wild ponies can sense a drop in barometric pressure. When a storm threatens, they know to seek shelter in hilly areas and huddle together with their rumps facing the oncoming wind.
Diane Ackerman
#70. The knowing, I told myself, is only a vapor of the mind, and yet it can wreck havok with one's sanity.
Diane Ackerman
#71. If organs as elemental as brain and heart can be persuaded to regenerate, and others, like ears and corneas, can be fashioned from living ink, how will that change us as a species? Will the printing of organs affect our evolution? Could it alter our genes?
Diane Ackerman
#72. Antonina woke in the night to help midwife an animal like a giraffe (always tricky because the mother gives birth standing up, the calf falls headfirst, and the mother doesn't want help anyway). This
Diane Ackerman
#73. Nature is also great fun. To pretend that nature isn't fun is to miss much of the joy of being alive.
Diane Ackerman
#74. How can love's spaciousness
be conveyed in the narrow
confines of one syllable?
Diane Ackerman
#75. We tend to think of heroes only in terms of violent combat, whether it's against enemies or a natural disaster. But human beings also perform radical acts of compassion; we just don't talk about them, or we don't talk about them as much.
Diane Ackerman
#77. 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
#78. What would dawn have been like, had you awakened? It would have sung through your bones. All I can do this morning is let it sing through mine.
Diane Ackerman
#79. The garden is a living, pulsing, singing, scratching, warring, erotic, and generally rowdy thing. I may find peace in its midst, but I regard it as a whole with many parts, a plural organism.
Diane Ackerman
#80. husk or shell that has grown up around a spark of holiness, masking its light" (203): Michael Wex, Born to Kvetch: Yiddish Language and Culture in All of Its Moods (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2005), p. 93. Yiddish's
Diane Ackerman
#81. After all, coffee is bitter, a flavor from the forbidden and dangerous realm.
Diane Ackerman
#82. Wonder is a bulky emotion. When you let it fill your heart and mind, there isn't room for anxiety, distress or anything else.
Diane Ackerman
#83. Selves will accumulate when one isn't looking, and they don't always act wisely or well.
Diane Ackerman
#84. Still, though no one is an island, most are peninsulas. Our lives wouldn't make sense without personal memories pinned like butterflies against the velvet backdrop of social history.
Diane Ackerman
#85. It began in mystery, and it will end in mystery, but what a savage and beautiful country lies in between.
Diane Ackerman
#86. Hurricane season brings a humbling reminder that, despite our technologies, most of nature remains unpredictable.
Diane Ackerman
#87. Humans are the most successful invasives of all time.
Diane Ackerman
#88. Love is the best school, but the tuition is high and the homework can be painful.
Diane Ackerman
#90. Who you are isn't tied solely to what you say, even though it may feel that way to you now.
Diane Ackerman
#91. It's like having a head full of holes, in which the perfect repository of words have shamed themselves, he lamented.
Diane Ackerman
#92. Below us somewhere in the gelatinous phantasmagoria of churning blue, the whales wouldn't be much aware of the storm.
Diane Ackerman
#93. Life is a thing that mutates without warning, not always in enviable ways. All part of the improbable adventure of being alive, of being a brainy biped with giant dreams on a crazy blue planet.
Diane Ackerman
#94. If a mind is just a few pounds of blood, urea, and electricity, how does it manage to contemplate itself, worry about its soul, do time-and-motion studies, admire the shy hooves of a goat, know that it will die, enjoy all the grand and lesser mayhems of the heart ?
Diane Ackerman
#95. 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
#96. I like handling newborn animals. Fallen into life from an unmappable world, they are the ultimate immigrants, full of wonder and confusion.
Diane Ackerman
#97. Give a man enough rope and he'll wrap himself around your little finger.
Diane Ackerman
#98. For better or worse, zoos are how most people come to know big or exotic animals. Few will ever see wild penguins sledding downhill to sea on their bellies, giant pandas holding bamboo lollipops in China or tree porcupines in the Canadian Rockies, balled up like giant pine cones.
Diane Ackerman
#99. Though not a natural world by any means, more like a collection of living dioramas, a zoo exists in its own time zone, somewhere between the seasonal sense of animals and our madly ticking watch time.
Diane Ackerman
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