Quote

habit, a particularly insidious thug who chokes passion and smothers love. Habit puts us on autopilot.

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
Particularly
Habit
Smothers
Passion
Chokes
Love
Autopilot
Thug
Insidious
Choke
Puts

More quotes by Diane Ackerman

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In the early years of the Uprising, we survived on one meal a day of horse meat and soup, but by the end we ate only dried peas, dogs, cats and birds.
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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.
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Libraries change lives. They are the soul of a people.
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Because we can't escape our ancient hunger to live close to nature, we encircle the house with lawns and gardens, install picture windows, adopt pets and Boston ferns, and scent everything that touches our lives.
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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We have vexed and bothered every plant and every animal on every continent.
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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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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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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For if I do something, I never do it thoughtlessly.
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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No matter how politely one says it, we owe our existence to the farts of blue-green algae.
Diane Ackerman
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Variety is the pledge that matter makes to living things.
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.
Diane Ackerman
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Words are such small things, like confetti in the brain, and yet they are color and clarify everything, they can stain the mind or warp the feelings.
Diane Ackerman
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In Manhattan last month I heard a woman borrowing the jargon of junkies to say to another, 'Want to do some chocolate?'
Diane Ackerman
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Human beings are sloshing sacks of chemicals on the move.
Diane Ackerman
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Though we marry as adults, we don't marry adults. We marry children who have grown up and still rejoice in being children, especially if we're creative.
Diane Ackerman
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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.
Diane Ackerman
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Who would drink from a cup when they can drink from the source?
Diane Ackerman