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
heart thinking knives
We think of it as a sort of traffic accident of the heart. It is an emotion that scares us more than cruelty, more than violence, more than hatred. We allow ourselves to be foiled by the vagueness of the word. After all, love requires the utmost vulnerability. We equip someone with freshly sharpened knives; strip naked; then invite him to stand close. What could be scarier?
smell mute
Smell is the mute sense, the one without words.
animal animal-rights species
It's animal by animal that you save a species.
art people inner-life
Nothing reveals more about the inner life of a people than their arts ...
art light shadow
Much of life becomes background, but it is the province of art to throw buckets of light into the shadows and make life new again.
garden thinking mind
[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.
success positive-attitude produce
Success produces success, just as money produces money.
attention
We are defined by how we place our attention.
senses understand
There is no way in which to understand the world without first detecting it through the radar-net of our senses.
law cities people
People search for love as if it were a city lost beneath the desert dunes, where pleasure is the law, the streets are lined with brocade cushions, and the sun never sets.
alone belongs body bond brains feels fusion internal matter neither self whose
Brain scans show synchrony between the brains of mother and child; but what they can't show is the internal bond that belongs to neither alone, a fusion in which the self feels so permeable it doesn't matter whose body is whose.
blowing fringe hail hurricane starts town
When a hurricane thrashes the mid-Atlantic, my hilly town often reaps the fringe of the storm. The rain starts blowing sideways, and sometimes we see hail the size of purie marbles.
divide evolved exist provide relation scouts volumes
When all is said and done, we exist only in relation to the world, and our senses evolved as scouts who bridge that divide and provide volumes of information, warnings and rewards.
areas drop facing seek shelter wild
Like many animals, wild ponies can sense a drop in barometric pressure. When a storm threatens, they know to seek shelter in hilly areas and huddle together with their rumps facing the oncoming wind.