Diane Ackerman Quotes

I don't want to be a passenger in my own life.

We live on the leash of our senses.

I don't want to get to the end of my life and find that I lived just the length of it. I want to have lived the width of it as well.

Knee-deep in the cosmic overwhelm, I’m strickenby the ricochet wonder of it all: the plaineverythingness of everything, in cahootswith the everythingness of everything else.- From Diffraction (for Carl Sagan)

The sensory misers will inherit the earth, but first they will make it not worth living on. When you consider something like death, after which we may well go out like a candle flame, then it probably won’t matter if we try too hard, are awkward sometimes, care for one another too deeply, are excessively curious about nature, are too open to experience, enjoy a nonstop expense of the senses in an effort to know life intimately and lovingly.

The faint pink coating the treetops promised rippling buds, a sure sign of spring hastening in, right on schedule, and the animal world getting ready for its fiesta of courting and mating, dueling and dancing, suckling and grubbing, costume-making and shedding-in short, the fuzzy, fizzy hoopla of life's ramshackle return.

As fleeting emotions stalk it, a face can leak fear or the guilt of a forming lie.

Why was it, she asked herself, that "animals can sometimes subdue their predatory ways in only a few months, while humans, despite centuries of refinement, can quickly grow more savage than any beast?