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: 75
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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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.
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The visual image is a kind of tripwire for the emotions.
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Culture is what people invent when they have lost nature.
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For if I do something, I never do it thoughtlessly.
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It began in mystery, and it will end in mystery, but what a savage and beautiful country lies in between.
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What an odd, ruminating, noisy, self-interrupting conversation we conduct with ourselves from birth to death.
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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.
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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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I'm an Earth ecstatic, and my creed is simple: All life is sacred, life loves life, and we are capable of improving our behavior toward one another. As basic as that is, for me it's also tonic and deeply spiritual, glorifying the smallest life-form and embracing the most distant stars.
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Nature neither gives nor expects mercy.
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Not much is known about alligators. They don't train well. And they're unwieldy and rowdy to work with in laboratories.
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Hurricane season brings a humbling reminder that, despite our technologies, most of nature remains unpredictable.
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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.
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As the most social apes, we inhabit a mirror-world in which every important relationship, whether with spouse, friend or child, shapes the brain, which in turn shapes our relationships.
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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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There are well-dressed foolish ideas just as there are well-dressed fools.
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My mother always said I must be part Mongolian because of my lotus-pale complexion and squid-ink black hair.
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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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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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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 ?
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