Diane Ackerman quotes - page 3

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)
Because we can't escape our ancient hunger to live close to nature, we encircle the house with lawns and gardens, install picture windows, adopt pets and Boston ferns, and scent everything that touches our lives. View quote
Diane Ackerman
Couples are jigsaw puzzles that hang together by touching in just enough points. They're never total fits or misfits. View quote
Diane Ackerman
For large minds, the Earth is a small place. Not small enough to exhaust in one lifetime, but a compact home, cozy, buoyant, a place to cherish, the spectral center of our life. But how could we stay at home forever? View quote
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 will inherit the earth, but first they will make it not worth living on. View quote
Diane Ackerman
We hallucinate sounds more often than sights. There are auditory mirages, which vanish without trace; auditory illusions that turn out to be something other than they seemed; and, of course, voices that speak to saints, seers, and psychotics, telling them how to act and what to believe. View quote
Diane Ackerman
But, as sages have long said, the sexiest part of the body and the best aphrodisiac in the world is the imagination. View quote
Diane Ackerman
Consciousness, the great poem of matter, seems so unlikely, so impossible, and yet here we are with our loneliness and our giant dreams. View quote
Diane Ackerman
What I'm really wondering is why notices were posted and invitations sent out at all: If it's a psychics' convention, shouldn't everyone just know where and when to meet? View quote
Diane Ackerman
Which is crueler, an old man's lost memories of a life lived, or a young man's lost memories of the life he meant to live? View quote
Diane Ackerman
When art separates this thick tangle of feelings, love bares its bones. (Diane Ackerman)
So much of our life passes in a comfortable blur. Living on the senses requires an easily triggered sense of marvel, a little extra energy, and most people are lazy about life. Life is something that happens to them while they wait for death. View quote
Diane Ackerman
Out-of-body experiences aim to shed the senses, but they cannot. One may see from a new perspective, but it's still an experience of vision. View quote
Diane Ackerman
My muse is male, has the silvery complexion of the moon, and never speaks to me directly. View quote
Diane Ackerman
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. View quote
Diane Ackerman
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. View quote
Diane Ackerman
I'm certainly not opposed to digital technology, whose graces I daily enjoy and rely on in so many ways. But I worry about our virtual blinders. View quote
Diane Ackerman
We're dabbling in eugenics all the time, breeding ideal crops to replace less aesthetic or nutritious or hardy varieties; leveling forests to graze cattle or erect shopping malls and condos; planting groves of a few familiar trees that homeowners and industries prefer. View quote
Diane Ackerman
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 vast the mind struggles to embrace them. View quote
Diane Ackerman
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. View quote
Diane Ackerman
Why humans feel pain has been the subject of theological debate, philosophical schisms, psychoanalytical edicts, and mumbo jumbo for centuries. Pain was the punishment for wrongdoing in the Garden of Eden. Pain was the price one paid for not being morally perfect. Pain was a self-affliction brought about by sexual repression. Pain was dished out by vengeful gods, or was the result of falling out of harmony with nature...The purpose of pain is to warn the body about possible injury. Millions of free nerve endings alarm us; whenever they're hit, we feel pain. (Diane Ackerman)
The Dutch carried vanilla to Indonesia, and the British to India. "Tincture of vanilla” didn't appear in the United States until the 1800s, but when it did, it appealed to the American impatience and aversion to fuss, that sprint through life whose byword is convenience. Europeans use the vanilla bean, luxuriating in its textures, tastes, and aromas, but we preferred it reduced and already bottled. By the nineteenth century, demand flourished, vanilla became synthesized, and the world floated on a mantle of cheap flavoring. View quote
Diane Ackerman
The color we see is always the one being reflected, the one that doesn't stay put and get absorbed. We see the rejected color, and say "an apple is red.” But in truth an apple is everything but red. View quote
Diane Ackerman
In the Bible, God instructs Moses to burn incense sweet and to His liking. Does God have nostrils? How can a god prefer one smell of this earth to another? The rudiments of decay complete a cycle necessary for growth and deliverance. Carrion smells offensive to us, but delicious to those animals who rely on it for food. What they excrete will make the soil rich and the crops abundant. There is no need for divine election. Perception is itself a form of grace. View quote
Diane Ackerman