A collection of quotations by Diane Ackerman on love, life, rainbow, mystery, nature, spirituality, beauty, environment, creatures, planet and enrichment.
Diane Ackerman is an American naturalist, author, essayist, teacher and poet who gained recognition for her unique way of exploring the wonders of the world through her poems. She studied English at Pennsylvania State University, before going on to acquire a masters degree and Ph.D. in fine arts from Cornell University. Ackeman has also taught at both Cornell University and Columbia University during her illustrious career. She has conducted research on natural phenomena at far corners of the world and her essays on these subjects have appeared in some of the leading publications like ‘The New Yorker’, ‘National Geographic’, ‘The New York Times’, ‘Parade and Smithsonian’. Ackerman has also been a prolific non-fiction writer and some of her noted works include ‘The Human Age: The World Shaped by Us’, ‘Dawn Light’, ‘One Hundred Names of Love’, ‘An Alchemy of Mind’, ‘Cultivating Delight’, ‘The Rarest of the Rare’, ‘A Natural History of Love’ and ‘The Zookeeper’s Wife’, which is to be turned into a motion picture. Ackerman is rightly considered to be among the most influential naturalists in the world. Her essays, writings and poems give a glimpse about her passion and love as an environmentalist. We have scanned Diane Ackerman's several works and writings to highlight her most popular and relevant quotes. Here is a collection of Diane Ackerman’s quotes and thoughts on love, life, rainbow, mystery, nature, spirituality, beauty, environment, creatures, planet and enrichment.
Words are small shapes in the gorgeous chaos of the world.
Diane Ackerman
Who would deduce the dragonfly from the larva, the iris from the bud, the lawyer from the infant? ...We are all shape-shifters and magical reinventors. Life is really a plural noun, a caravan of selves.
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.
And yet, words are the passkeys to our souls. Without them, we can't really share the enormity of our lives.
Diane Ackerman
To begin to understand the gorgeous fever that is consciousness, we must try to understand the senses and what they can tell us about the ravishing world we have the privilege to inhabit.
Diane Ackerman
Couples are jigsaw puzzles that hang together by touching in just enough points.
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?
How can love's spaciousness
be conveyed in the narrow
confines of one syllable?
Diane Ackerman
The daftest logic brings such sweet unrest.
Diane Ackerman
Couples are jigsaw puzzles that hang together by touching in just enough points. They're never total fits or misfits. ... We marry children who have grown up and still rejoice in being children .... [p. 15]
No matter how politely one says it, we owe our existence to the farts of blue-green algae.
Diane Ackerman
But who can say why two people become a couple, that small principality of mutual protection and regard? Couples are jigsaw puzzles that hang together by touching in just enough points.
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.
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.
Antonina felt convinced that people needed to connect more with their animal nature, but also that animals long for human company, reach out for human attention.
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.
Listen, I'd rather lie naked in a plowed field under an incontinent horse for a week than have to read that paragraph again!
Diane Ackerman
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 only dried peas, dogs, cats and birds.
Diane Ackerman
A good strategy should dictate the right actions. Any action mustn't be impulsive, but analyzed along with all its possible outcomes. A solid plan always includes many backups and alternatives.
Diane Ackerman
I do feel responsible. He used to be able to look after himself. Now he can't. That's so different, so strange. The big question is: Is more improvement really possible, or should I stop pushing him?' [p. 153]
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
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
What sort of stewards of the future planet will today’s digital children be?
The senses don’t just make sense of life in bold or subtle acts of clarity, they tear reality apart into vibrant morsels and reassemble them into a meaningful pattern.
Words are small shapes in the gorgeous chaos of the world. But they are shapes, they bring the world into focus, they corral ideas, they hone thoughts, they paint watercolors of perception.
Diane Ackerman
Perversion is the erotic form of hatred.
Diane Ackerman
Music, the perfume of hearing, probably began as a religious act, to arouse groups of people.
