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Smell is the mute sense, the one without words.

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
Sense
Without
Mute
Smell
Words

More quotes by Diane Ackerman

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Human beings are sloshing sacks of chemicals on the move.
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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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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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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Culture is what people invent when they have lost nature.
Diane Ackerman
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In our heart we know that life loves life. Yet we feast on some of the other life-forms with which we share our planet we kill to live. Taste is what carries us across that rocky moral terrain, what makes the horror palatable, and the paradox we could not defend by reason melts into a jungle of sweet temptations.
Diane Ackerman
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It began in mystery, and it will end in mystery, but what a savage and beautiful country lies in between.
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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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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Love is the best school, but the tuition is high and the homework can be painful.
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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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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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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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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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
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The knowing, I told myself, is only a vapor of the mind, and yet it can wreck havok with one's sanity.
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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Flight is nothing but an attitude in motion.
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