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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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Diane Ackerman
Age: 76
Born: 1948
Born: October 7
Author
Naturalist
Non-Fiction Writer
Poet
Screenwriter
Writer
Waukegan
Illinois
Feels
Poet
Afraid
Journey
Journeys
Taking
Reluctant
Risk
Venture
Learn
Risks
Without
Poets
Feel
Dramatic

More quotes by 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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Love is the best school, but the tuition is high and the homework can be painful.
Diane Ackerman
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Adult bats don't weigh much. They're mainly fur and appetite.
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
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On some summer days in New York City, the air hangs thickly visible, like the combined exhalations of eight million souls. Steam rising from vents underground makes you wonder if there isn't one giant sweat gland lodged beneath the city.
Diane Ackerman
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Look in the mirror. The face that pins you with its double gaze reveals a chastening secret.
Diane Ackerman
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Adventure is not something you travel to find. It's something you take with you, or you're not going to find it when you arrive.
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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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.
Diane Ackerman
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Look at your feet. You are standing in the sky. When we think of the sky, we tend to look up, but the sky actually begins at the earth.
Diane Ackerman
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Writer's block is a luxury most people with deadlines don't have.
Diane Ackerman
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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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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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[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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People search for love as if it were a city lost beneath the desert dunes, where pleasure is the law, the streets are lined with brocade cushions, and the sun never sets.
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 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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Hurricane season brings a humbling reminder that, despite our technologies, most of nature remains unpredictable.
Diane Ackerman
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For if I do something, I never do it thoughtlessly.
Diane Ackerman
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Home is where the heart is, we say, rubbing the flint of one abstraction against another.
Diane Ackerman