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Our skin is what stands between us and the world.

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
Stands
Skin
Skins
World

More quotes by 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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There are well-dressed foolish ideas just as there are well-dressed fools.
Diane Ackerman
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When I set a glass prism on a windowsill and allow the sun to flood through it, a spectrum of colors dances on the floor. What we call white is a rainbow of colored rays packed into a small space. The prism sets them free. Love is the white light of emotion.
Diane Ackerman
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We live on the leash of our senses.
Diane Ackerman
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The only and absolute perfect union of two is when a baby hangs suspended in its mother's womb, like a tiny madman in a padded cell, attached to her, feeling her blood and hormones, and moods play through its body, feeling her feelings.
Diane Ackerman
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Human beings are sloshing sacks of chemicals on the move.
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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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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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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There was nothing to do but wait. It is always like this for naturalists, and for poets--the long hours of travel and preparation, and then the longer hours of waiting. All for that one electric, pulse-revving vision when the universe suddenly declares itself.
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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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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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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I don't want to be a passenger in my own life.
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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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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To begin to understand the gorgeous fever that is consciousness, we must try to understand the senses and what they can tell us about the ravishing world we have the privilege to inhabit.
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'm sure civilizations will still evolve through play, or rather as play, since that seems to be a fundamental mechanism of our humanity.
Diane Ackerman