Quote

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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Diane Ackerman
Age: 76
Born: 1948
Born: October 7
Author
Naturalist
Non-Fiction Writer
Poet
Screenwriter
Writer
Waukegan
Illinois
Like
Mines
Hidden
Poignant
Mass
Mad
Smells
Sweet
Town
Softly
Memories
Towns
August
Weedy
Land
Smell
Potatoes
Detonate
Family
Brings
Pot
Midwestern
Mind
Dinner
Scent
Myrtle
Years
Memory
Senior
Roast

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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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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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As people flock to urban centers where ground space is limited, cities with green walls and roofs and skyscraper farms offer improved health and well-being, renewable resources, reliable food supply, and relief to the environment.
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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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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.
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Adult bats don't weigh much. They're mainly fur and appetite.
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Humans are the most successful invasives of all time.
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Symbolic of life, hair bolts from our head[s]. Like the earth, it can be harvested, but it will rise again. We can change its color and texture when the mood strikes us, but in time it will return to its original form, just as Nature will in time turn our precisely laid-out cities into a weed-way.
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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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Wonder is the heaviest element on the periodic table. Even a tiny fleck of it stops time.
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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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The visual image is a kind of tripwire for the emotions.
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Couples are jigsaw puzzles that hang together by touching in just enough points. They're never total fits or misfits. In time, a pair invents its own commonwealth, complete with anthems, rituals, and lingos-a cult of two with fallible gods.
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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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What an odd, ruminating, noisy, self-interrupting conversation we conduct with ourselves from birth to death.
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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.
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Smell is the mute sense, the one without words.
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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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We evolved as creatures knitted into the fabric of nature, and without its intimate truths, we can find ourselves unraveling.
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