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We can't enchant the world, which makes its own magic but we can enchant ourselves by paying deep attention

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
Deep
Attention
Makes
World
Enchant
Paying
Magic

More quotes by Diane Ackerman

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Life becomes a lot simpler for a creative person when he or she finds the routine that works best. ... get in the habit of going through the routine every day, and on some of those days, you're going to be lucky and have done some good work. ... Go to your study, close the door, invent your confidence.
Diane Ackerman
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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.
Diane Ackerman
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What an odd, ruminating, noisy, self-interrupting conversation we conduct with ourselves from birth to death.
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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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.
Diane Ackerman
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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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Home is where the heart is, we say, rubbing the flint of one abstraction against another.
Diane Ackerman
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Libraries change lives. They are the soul of a people.
Diane Ackerman
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For if I do something, I never do it thoughtlessly.
Diane Ackerman
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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.
Diane Ackerman
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[On gardens:] I think they're sanctuaries for the mind and spirit. ... It's easy to feel wonder-struck in a garden, especially if you cultivate delight.
Diane Ackerman
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habit, a particularly insidious thug who chokes passion and smothers love. Habit puts us on autopilot.
Diane Ackerman
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Adult bats don't weigh much. They're mainly fur and appetite.
Diane Ackerman
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As a species, we've somehow survived large and small ice ages, genetic bottlenecks, plagues, world wars and all manner of natural disasters, but I sometimes wonder if we'll survive our own ingenuity.
Diane Ackerman
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Part of the irony of environmentalism is questing for solutions when you know you're part of the problem.
Diane Ackerman
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If a mind is just a few pounds of blood, urea, and electricity, how does it manage to contemplate itself, worry about its soul, do time-and-motion studies, admire the shy hooves of a goat, know that it will die, enjoy all the grand and lesser mayhems of the heart ?
Diane Ackerman
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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
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In our heart we know that life loves life. Yet we feast on some of the other life-forms with which we share our planet we kill to live. Taste is what carries us across that rocky moral terrain, what makes the horror palatable, and the paradox we could not defend by reason melts into a jungle of sweet temptations.
Diane Ackerman
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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.
Diane Ackerman
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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.
Diane Ackerman