Diane Ackerman
Diane Ackerman
Diane Ackermanis an American poet, essayist, and naturalist known for her wide-ranging curiosity and poetic explorations of the natural world...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth7 October 1948
CountryUnited States of America
sex spring flower
A flower's fragrance declares to all the world that it is fertile, available, and desirable, its sex organs oozing with nectar. Its smell reminds us in vestigial ways of fertility, vigor, life-force, all the optimism, expectancy, and passionate bloom of youth. We inhale its ardent aroma and, no matter what our ages, we feel young and nubile in a world aflame with desire.
summer nature memories
Nothing is more memorable than a smell. One scent can be unexpected, momentary and fleeting, yet conjure up a childhood summer beside a lake in the mountains.
length just-live wells
Don't just live the length of your life - live the width of it as well.
love-is emotional color
Love is like a batik created from many emotional colors, it is a fabric whose pattern and brightness may vary.
love school tuition
Love is the best school, but the tuition is high and the homework can be painful.
weed color cities
Symbolic of life, hair bolts from our head[s]. Like the earth, it can be harvested, but it will rise again. We can change its color and texture when the mood strikes us, but in time it will return to its original form, just as Nature will in time turn our precisely laid-out cities into a weed-way.
beautiful two may
For me, life offers so many complexly appealing moments that two beautiful objects may be equally beautiful for different reasons and at different times. How can one choose?
trying fever world
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.
sleep night evil
Things that live by night live outside the realm of 'normal' time and so suggest living outside the realm of good and evil, since we have moralistic feelings about time. Chauvinistic about our human need to wake by day and sleep by night, we come to associate night dwellers with people up to no good at a time when they have the jump on the rest of us and are defying nature, defying their circadian rhythms.
space phantoms needs
Tranquillity hides in small spaces, and when found needs to be treasured, because you know it's a phantom that will slip away again.
soul share our-lives
And yet, words are the passkeys to our souls. Without them, we can't really share the enormity of our lives.
past poetry telescopes
Poetry is an act of distillation. It takes contingency samples, is selective. It telescopes time. It focuses what most often floods past us in a polite blur.
rain book fall
I think if you look at any facet of nature in enough detail, you find it fascinating. How could you not? The universe is so full of marvels. Here's an example -- rain, the shape of rain. I was minding my own business, working on my book, looking out the window, and it was raining and I was noticing that the raindrops were falling in that classic round-looking way, and I thought, 'I wonder if raindrops really are round?' So I started researching it a little, and I discovered that raindrops change shape 300 times a second.
sex adventure zest
It's so acceptably easy for a woman not to strive too hard, not to be too adventure-crazed, not to take too many risks, not to enjoy sex with full candor ... It isn't seemly for a woman to have that much zest.