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Culture is what people invent when they have lost nature.

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
Lost
Nature
People
Invent
Culture

More quotes by Diane Ackerman

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habit, a particularly insidious thug who chokes passion and smothers love. Habit puts us on autopilot.
Diane Ackerman
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We humans are obsessed with lights...Perhaps it is our way of hurling the constellations back at the sky.
Diane Ackerman
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We're losing biodiversity globally at an alarming rate, and we need a cornucopia of different plants and animals, for the planet's health and our own.
Diane Ackerman
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It's animal by animal that you save a species.
Diane Ackerman
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I swear I will not dishonor my soul with hatred, but offer myself humbly as a guardian of nature, as a healer of misery, as a messenger of wonder, as an architect of peace.
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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There's no place you can go on the prairie that you don't hear the white noise of the wind, steady and rough as surf curling along a non-existant shore.
Diane Ackerman
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Nature neither gives nor expects mercy.
Diane Ackerman
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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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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
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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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I don't want to be a passenger in my own life.
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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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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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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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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The visual image is a kind of tripwire for the emotions.
Diane Ackerman
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It's essential to tailor rehab to what impassions someone. The brain gradually learns by riveting its attention-through endless repetitions.
Diane Ackerman
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Human beings are sloshing sacks of chemicals on the move.
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