Quote

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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Diane Ackerman
Age: 76
Born: 1948
Born: October 7
Author
Naturalist
Non-Fiction Writer
Poet
Screenwriter
Writer
Waukegan
Illinois
Feelings
Clarify
Everything
Warp
Stain
Mind
Stains
Things
Color
Like
Small
Brain
Words
Confetti

More quotes by Diane Ackerman

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Not much is known about alligators. They don't train well. And they're unwieldy and rowdy to work with in laboratories.
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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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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We live on the leash of our senses.
Diane Ackerman
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In the winter, I enjoy cross-country skiing and raising orchids and amaryllises. If I could grow tropical flowers as perennials, I would, especially hibiscus and mandavilla.
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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habit, a particularly insidious thug who chokes passion and smothers love. Habit puts us on autopilot.
Diane Ackerman
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Poetry reminds us of the truths about life and human nature that we knew all along, but forgot somehow because they weren't yet in memorable language.
Diane Ackerman
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History is an agreed-upon fiction.
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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Look in the mirror. The face that pins you with its double gaze reveals a chastening secret.
Diane Ackerman
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As a species, we've somehow survived large and small ice ages, genetic bottlenecks, plagues, world wars and all manner of natural disasters, but I sometimes wonder if we'll survive our own ingenuity.
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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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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Culture is what people invent when they have lost nature.
Diane Ackerman
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Artificial intelligence is growing up fast, as are robots whose facial expressions can elicit empathy and make your mirror neurons quiver.
Diane Ackerman
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Our relationship with nature has changed radically, irreversibly, but by no means all for the bad. Our new epoch is laced with invention. Our mistakes are legion, but our talent is immeasurable.
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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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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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