Quote

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.

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
Nothing
Wait
Naturalists
Long
Travel
Declares
Always
Poet
Naturalist
Like
Longer
Pulse
Vision
Electric
Waiting
Poets
Hours
Preparation
Universe
Suddenly

More quotes by Diane Ackerman

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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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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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After all, coffee is bitter, a flavor from the forbidden and dangerous realm.
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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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Our skin is what stands between us and the world.
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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.
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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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Wonder is the heaviest element on the periodic table. Even a tiny fleck of it stops time.
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There are well-dressed foolish ideas just as there are well-dressed fools.
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No matter how politely one says it, we owe our existence to the farts of blue-green algae.
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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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We humans are obsessed with lights...Perhaps it is our way of hurling the constellations back at the sky.
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I hate the fearful trimming of possibilities that age brings.
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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.
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We're losing biodiversity globally at an alarming rate, and we need a cornucopia of different plants and animals, for the planet's health and our own.
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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.
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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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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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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.
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Hurricane season brings a humbling reminder that, despite our technologies, most of nature remains unpredictable.
Diane Ackerman