Diane Ackerman Quotes
As the most social apes, we inhabit a mirror-world in which every important relationship, whether with spouse, friend or child, shapes the brain, which in turn shapes our relationships.
I believe consciousness is brazenly physical, a raucous mirage the brain creates to help us survive.
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.
My mother always said I must be part Mongolian because of my lotus-pale complexion and squid-ink black hair.
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.
Part of the irony of environmentalism is questing for solutions when you know you're part of the problem.
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.
Of all the errands life seems to be running, of all the mysteries that enchant us, love is my favorite
We humans are obsessed with lights...Perhaps it is our way of hurling the constellations back at the sky.
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?
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.
There is that unique moment when one confronts something new and astonishment begins.
Our relationship with nature has changed radically, irreversibly, but by no means all for the bad. Our new epoch is laced with invention. Our mistakes are legion, but our talent is immeasurable.
Our sense of safety depends on predictability, so anything living outside the usual rules we suspect to be an outlaw, a ghoul.
Adventure is not something you travel to find. It's something you take with you, or you're not going to find it when you arrive.
the biggest threat to the religious experience may well come from organized religion itself.
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.
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.
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.
Mystery causes a mental itch, which the brain tries to soothe with the balm of reasonable talk.
Alligators have beautiful undulating skin, which feels dense, spongy, solid, like the best eraser.
It began in mystery and it will end in mystery, but what a rare and beautiful country lies in between.
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.
Much more. We're joined at the heart.""Bad luck for you, I'm afraid. My ticker's pretty wonky.""Too much boozing."His eyes twinkled, and he drew me close. "Not enough kissling.
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.
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.