Quote

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.

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
Days
Eight
Combined
Vents
Wonder
Million
Giant
Thickly
Makes
Summer
Giants
Gland
Soul
Air
Beneath
Lodged
Like
York
Sweat
Glands
City
Visible
Hangs
Cities
Rising
Underground
Millions
Souls
Steam
Exhalations

More quotes by Diane Ackerman

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Variety is the pledge that matter makes to living things.
Diane Ackerman
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Habitats keep evolving new pageants of species, and we shouldn't interfere.
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A kiss is like singing into someone's mouth.
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Look at your feet. You are standing in the sky. When we think of the sky, we tend to look up, but the sky actually begins at the earth.
Diane Ackerman
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I don't want to be a passenger in my own life.
Diane Ackerman
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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
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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
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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
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One of the things I like best about animals in the wild is that they're always off on some errand. They have appointments to keep. It's only we humans who wonder what we're here for.
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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
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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
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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
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Home is where the heart is, we say, rubbing the flint of one abstraction against another.
Diane Ackerman
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Because poets feel what we're afraid to feel, venture where we're reluctant to go, we learn from their journeys without taking the same dramatic risks.
Diane Ackerman
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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.
Diane Ackerman
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What would dawn have been like, had you awakened? It would have sung through your bones. All I can do this morning is let it sing through mine.
Diane Ackerman
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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
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We live on the leash of our senses.
Diane Ackerman
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...for most people in the [Jewish] Ghetto [of Warsaw] nature lived only in memory -- no parks, birds, or greenery existed in the Ghetto -- and they suffered the loss of nature like a phantom-limb pain, an amputation that scrambled the body's rhythms, starved the senses, and made basic ideas about the world impossible for children to fathom.
Diane Ackerman
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An animal on a leash is not tamed by the owner. The owner is extending himself through the leash to that part of his personality which is pure dog, that part of him which just wants to eat, sleep, bark, hump chairs, wet the floor in joy, and drink out of a toilet bowl.
Diane Ackerman