Top 100 Diane Ackerman Quotes
#1. Adult bats don't weigh much. They're mainly fur and appetite.
Diane Ackerman
#3. As a species, we've somehow survived large and small ice ages, genetic bottlenecks, plagues, world wars and all manner of natural disasters, but I sometimes wonder if we'll survive our own ingenuity.
Diane Ackerman
#4. Nature is more like a seesaw than a crystal, a never-ending conga line of bold moves and corrections.
Diane Ackerman
#5. Because IQ tests favor memory skills and logic, overlooking artistic creativity, insight, resiliency, emotional reserves, sensory gifts, and life experience, they can't really predict success, let alone satisfaction.
Diane Ackerman
#6. We can't enchant the world, which makes its own magic; but we can enchant ourselves by paying deep attention
Diane Ackerman
#7. Writer's block is a luxury most people with deadlines don't have.
Diane Ackerman
#8. 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
#9. Writing, which is my form of celebration and prayer, is also my form of inquiry.
Diane Ackerman
#10. Our mistakes are legion, but our talent is immeasurable.
Diane Ackerman
#11. Just as our ancient ancestors drew animals on cave walls and carved animals from wood and bone, we decorate our homes with animal prints and motifs, give our children stuffed animals to clutch, cartoon animals to watch, animal stories to read.
Diane Ackerman
#12. Even without seeing the crickets, grasshoppers, cicadas and katydids, we hear them shrilling in this season and trust that they're the tiny living gargoyles entomologists claim.
Diane Ackerman
#13. Happiness doesn't require laughter, only well-being and a sense that the world is breaking someone else's heart, not mine.
Diane Ackerman
#14. 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 our memory like poignant land mines hidden under the weedy mass of years.
Diane Ackerman
#16. Poetry reminds us of the truths about life and human nature that we knew all along, but forgot somehow because they weren't yet in memorable language.
Diane Ackerman
#17. Each photograph is a magic lamp rubbed by the mind.
Diane Ackerman
#18. 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
#19. Who would drink from a cup when they can drink from the source?
Diane Ackerman
#20. 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
#21. 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
#22. The Germans have removed, murdered or burned alive tens of thousands of Jews. Out of the three million Polsih Jews, no more than 10 percent remain.
Diane Ackerman
#24. Tranquillity hides in small spaces, and when found needs to be treasured, because you know it's a phantom that will slip away again.
Diane Ackerman
#25. The simple, stupefying truth that, as a woman, I am a minute ocean, in the dark tropic of whose womb eggs lay coded as roe, floating in the sea that wet-nursed us all, moved me deeply.
Diane Ackerman
#26. 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
#27. 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
#28. 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
#29. 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
#30. 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
#31. Above all, we ask the poet to teach us a way of seeing ...
Diane Ackerman
#32. 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
#33. I don't understand all the fuss. If any creature is in danger, you save it, human or animal.
Diane Ackerman
#34. 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
#35. 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
#36. Sometimes with a flutter of agitated worry that felt like a beetle was trapped inside my ribs. p. 90
Diane Ackerman
#37. When a hurricane thrashes the mid-Atlantic, my hilly town often reaps the fringe of the storm. The rain starts blowing sideways, and sometimes we see hail the size of purie marbles.
Diane Ackerman
#38. 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
#39. 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
#40. We humans are obsessed with lights ... Perhaps it is our way of hurling the constellations back at the sky.
Diane Ackerman
#41. 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
#42. Wonder is the heaviest element on the periodic table. Even a tiny fleck of it stops time.
Diane Ackerman
#43. If an expectant mother stepped over a rope on the ground or under a clothesline, the umbilical cord would tangle during childbirth. Mothers-to-be should
Diane Ackerman
#44. Why was it, she asked herself, that 'animals can sometimes subdue their predatory ways in only a few months, while humans, despite centuries of refinement, can quickly grow more savage than any beast.
Diane Ackerman
#45. If cynicism is inevitable as one ages, so is the yearning for innocence. To children heaven is being an adult, and to adults heaven is being children again.
Diane Ackerman
#46. 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
#47. 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
#48. Brain scans show synchrony between the brains of mother and child; but what they can't show is the internal bond that belongs to neither alone, a fusion in which the self feels so permeable it doesn't matter whose body is whose.
Diane Ackerman
#49. 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
#50. 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.
Diane Ackerman
#51. Words are small shapes in the gorgeous chaos of the world.
Diane Ackerman
#52. 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
#53. 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 refer to plants by Latin name are considered more expert, if a little pedantic.
Diane Ackerman
#54. Habit, a particularly insidious thug who chokes passion and smothers love. Habit puts us on autopilot.
Diane Ackerman
#55. Germany's crime is the greatest crime the world has ever known, because it is not on the scale of History: it is on the scale of Evolution.
Diane Ackerman
#56. Home is where the heart is, we say, rubbing the flint of one abstraction against another.
Diane Ackerman
#57. A perfect balance is possible to imagine, but impossible to reach, so one is always trembling along an arc from too excited to too bored and back again. Everything we love most - be it sweetheart or flower - looks majestic because it seems to be trembling out of balance. While
Diane Ackerman
#58. 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
#59. What do those of us who aren't tall, flawlessly sculpted adolescents do?
Answer: Console ourselves with how relative beauty can be ...
Thank heavens for the arousing qualities of zest, intelligence,
wit, curiosity, sweetness, passion, talent and grace.
Diane Ackerman
#60. 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
#62. Our sense of safety depends on predictability, so anything living outside the usual rules we suspect to be an outlaw, a ghoul.
Diane Ackerman
#63. We marry children who have grown up and still rejoice in being children, especially if we're creative. Imaginative people fidget with ideas, including the idea of a relationship. If they're wordsmiths like us, they fidget a lot in words.
Diane Ackerman
#64. 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
#65. 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
#66. 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 percent of the Orthodox community perished, among them many who had kept alive an ancient tradition of mysticism and meditation reaching back to the Old Testament world of the prophets.
Diane Ackerman
#67. Variety is the pledge that matter makes to living things.
Diane Ackerman
#68. What a lonely species we are, searching for signals of life from other galaxies, adopting companion animals, visiting parks and zoos to commune with other beasts. In the process, we discover our shared identity.
Diane Ackerman
#69. 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
#70. [On gardens:] I think they're sanctuaries for the mind and spirit ... It's easy to feel wonder-struck in a garden, especially if you cultivate delight.
Diane Ackerman
#71. A poem records emotions and moods that lie beyond normal language, that can only be patched together and hinted at metaphorically.
Diane Ackerman
#72. 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
#73. Love is an act of sedition, a revolt against reason, an uprising in the body politic, a private mutiny.
Diane Ackerman
#74. Of all the errands life seems to be running, of all the mysteries that enchant us, love is my favorite
Diane Ackerman
#75. Human beings are sloshing sacks of chemicals on the move.
Diane Ackerman
#77. I consider fiction a very high-class form of lying. I enjoy and admire it enormously, but I don't think I'm very good at it.
Diane Ackerman
#78. 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
#79. What an odd, ruminating, noisy, self-interrupting conversation we conduct with ourselves from birth to death.
Diane Ackerman
#80. Don't just live the length of your life - live the width of it as well.
Diane Ackerman
#81. All our senses feed the brain, and if it diets mainly on cruelty and suffering, how can it remain healthy?
Diane Ackerman
#82. 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
#85. American writer
1803-1882
Play is our brain's favorite way of learning.
Diane Ackerman
#86. God may promise not to destroy creation, but it is not a promise humankind made - to our peril.
Diane Ackerman
#87. Look in the mirror. The face that pins you with its double gaze reveals a chastening secret.
Diane Ackerman
#88. The more we exile ourselves from nature, the more we crave its miracle waters.
Diane Ackerman
#90. I hate the fearful trimming of possibilities that age brings.
Diane Ackerman
#91. 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
#92. No matter how politely one says it, we owe our existence to the farts of blue-green algae.
Diane Ackerman
#93. 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
#94. Artificial intelligence is growing up fast, as are robots whose facial expressions can elicit empathy and make your mirror neurons quiver.
Diane Ackerman
#95. Not much is known about alligators. They don't train well. And they're unwieldy and rowdy to work with in laboratories.
Diane Ackerman
#96. 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
#98. We try to exile ourselves more and more from nature - not always consciously: We build houses; we dismiss nature; nature has to be outside, because we're inside. God forbid something like a cockroach comes inside, or some dust.
Diane Ackerman
#100. Insight roams the sea of the unconscious like the Loch Ness monster, a rumor whose wake occasionally becomes visible, but even then it's mystifying and scarcely believed.
Diane Ackerman
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
