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My mother always said I must be part Mongolian because of my lotus-pale complexion and squid-ink black hair.

Diane Ackerman

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Diane Ackerman
Age: 76
Born: 1948
Born: October 7
Author
Naturalist
Non-Fiction Writer
Poet
Screenwriter
Writer
Waukegan
Illinois
Ink
Pale
Hair
Mongolian
Black
Squid
Mother
Squids
Lotuses
Part
Lotus
Must
Complexion
Always

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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.
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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.
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Nature is also great fun. To pretend that nature isn't fun is to miss much of the joy of being alive.
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Wonder is a bulky emotion. When you let it fill your heart and mind, there isn't room for anxiety, distress or anything else.
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We can't enchant the world, which makes its own magic but we can enchant ourselves by paying deep attention
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Though we marry as adults, we don't marry adults. We marry children who have grown up and still rejoice in being children, especially if we're creative.
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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.
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Habitats keep evolving new pageants of species, and we shouldn't interfere.
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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.
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We humans are obsessed with lights...Perhaps it is our way of hurling the constellations back at the sky.
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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?
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Our skin is what stands between us and the world.
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Humans are the most successful invasives of all time.
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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.
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Look in the mirror. The face that pins you with its double gaze reveals a chastening secret.
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The knowing, I told myself, is only a vapor of the mind, and yet it can wreck havok with one's sanity.
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All relationships change the brain - but most important are the intimate bonds that foster or fail us, altering the delicate circuits that shape memories, emotions and that ultimate souvenir, the self.
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We would lie on coral sand, below sugary stars, watching Cassiopeia mount her throne and the Great Bear wash its paws in the South. I would say, I have a secret to tell you. And, folding me in your arms, boyish and sly, you would answer: Whisper it into my mouth.
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A poem records emotions and moods that lie beyond normal language, that can only be patched together and hinted at metaphorically.
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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.
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