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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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Diane Ackerman
Age: 76
Born: 1948
Born: October 7
Author
Naturalist
Non-Fiction Writer
Poet
Screenwriter
Writer
Waukegan
Illinois
Conduct
Conversation
Birth
Death
Self
Ruminating
Interrupting
Noisy
Odd

More quotes by Diane Ackerman

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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.
Diane Ackerman
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Artificial intelligence is growing up fast, as are robots whose facial expressions can elicit empathy and make your mirror neurons quiver.
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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.
Diane Ackerman
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Because poets feel what we're afraid to feel, venture where we're reluctant to go, we learn from their journeys without taking the same dramatic risks.
Diane Ackerman
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Nature neither gives nor expects mercy.
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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.
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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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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Wonder is the heaviest element on the periodic table. Even a tiny fleck of it stops time.
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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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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An occasion, catalyst, or tripwire?permits the poet to reach into herself and haul up whatever nugget of the human condition distracts her at the moment, something that can't be reached in any other way.
Diane Ackerman
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Choice is a signature of our species.
Diane Ackerman
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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.
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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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
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Libraries change lives. They are the soul of a people.
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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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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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?
Diane Ackerman