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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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Diane Ackerman
Age: 76
Born: 1948
Born: October 7
Author
Naturalist
Non-Fiction Writer
Poet
Screenwriter
Writer
Waukegan
Illinois
Think
Fighting
Reluctant
Thinking
Lives
Vocabulary
Without
Directly
Important
Fight
Even
Passion
Thing
Names
Would
Talk
Supple
Love
Dies
Linger
More quotes by Diane Ackerman
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
We have vexed and bothered every plant and every animal on every continent.
Diane Ackerman
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
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
I don't want to be a passenger in my own life.
Diane Ackerman
Not much is known about alligators. They don't train well. And they're unwieldy and rowdy to work with in laboratories.
Diane Ackerman
What an odd, ruminating, noisy, self-interrupting conversation we conduct with ourselves from birth to death.
Diane Ackerman
A poem records emotions and moods that lie beyond normal language, that can only be patched together and hinted at metaphorically.
Diane Ackerman
The visual image is a kind of tripwire for the emotions.
Diane Ackerman
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
Wonder is a bulky emotion. When you let it fill your heart and mind, there isn't room for anxiety, distress or anything else.
Diane Ackerman
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.
Diane Ackerman
Wonder is the heaviest element on the periodic table. Even a tiny fleck of it stops time.
Diane Ackerman
Part of the irony of environmentalism is questing for solutions when you know you're part of the problem.
Diane Ackerman
There is a way of beholding nature which is a form of prayer, a way of minding something with such clarity and aliveness that the rest of the world recedes. It . . . gives the brain a small vacation.
Diane Ackerman
It began in mystery, and it will end in mystery, but what a savage and beautiful country lies in between.
Diane Ackerman
Look in the mirror. The face that pins you with its double gaze reveals a chastening secret.
Diane Ackerman
No matter how politely one says it, we owe our existence to the farts of blue-green algae.
Diane Ackerman
After all, coffee is bitter, a flavor from the forbidden and dangerous realm.
Diane Ackerman
In Manhattan last month I heard a woman borrowing the jargon of junkies to say to another, 'Want to do some chocolate?'
Diane Ackerman