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

More quotes by Diane Ackerman

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Nature neither gives nor expects mercy.
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We live on the leash of our senses.
Diane Ackerman
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Nature is more like a seesaw than a crystal, a never-ending conga line of bold moves and corrections.
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Human beings are sloshing sacks of chemicals on the move.
Diane Ackerman
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No matter how politely one says it, we owe our existence to the farts of blue-green algae.
Diane Ackerman
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Of all the errands life seems to be running, of all the mysteries that enchant us, love is my favorite
Diane Ackerman
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...for most people in the [Jewish] Ghetto [of Warsaw] nature lived only in memory -- no parks, birds, or greenery existed in the Ghetto -- and they suffered the loss of nature like a phantom-limb pain, an amputation that scrambled the body's rhythms, starved the senses, and made basic ideas about the world impossible for children to fathom.
Diane Ackerman
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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.
Diane Ackerman
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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.
Diane Ackerman
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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.
Diane Ackerman
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What would dawn have been like, had you awakened? It would have sung through your bones. All I can do this morning is let it sing through mine.
Diane Ackerman
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Libraries change lives. They are the soul of a people.
Diane Ackerman
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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
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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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After all, coffee is bitter, a flavor from the forbidden and dangerous realm.
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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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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hope and uncertainty [are] the twin ingredients necessary for romance to thrive. ... Nothing begins with so much excitement and hope, or fails as often, as love.
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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And yet, words are the passkeys to our souls. Without them, we can't really share the enormity of our lives.
Diane Ackerman