Diane Ackerman (born October 7, 1948) is an American poet, essayist, and naturalist known for her wide-ranging curiosity and poetic explorations of the natural world.
Adult bats don't weigh much. They're mainly fur and appetite.
The great affair, the love affair with life, is to live as variously as possible, to groom one's curiosity like a high-spirited thoroughbred, climb aboard, and gallop over the thick, sunstruck hills every day.
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.
If a mind is just a few pounds of blood, urea, and electricity, how does it manage to contemplate itself, worry about its soul, do time-and-motion studies, admire the shy hooves of a goat, know that it will die, enjoy all the grand and lesser mayhems of the heart ?
It's essential to tailor rehab to what impassions someone. The brain gradually learns by riveting its attention-through endless repetitions.
In our heart we know that life loves life. Yet we feast on some of the other life-forms with which we share our planet; we kill to live. Taste is what carries us across that rocky moral terrain, what makes the horror palatable, and the paradox we could not defend by reason melts into a jungle of sweet temptations.
Nothing reveals more about the inner life of a people than their arts.
An occasion, catalyst, or tripwire?permits the poet to reach into herself and haul up whatever nugget of the human condition distracts her at the moment, something that can't be reached in any other way.
One of the keystones of romantic love - and also of the ecstatic religion practiced by mystics - is the powerful desire to become one with the beloved.
Touch seems to be as essential as sunlight.
Love, like truth, is the unassailable defense.
The more we exile ourselves from nature, the more we crave its miracle waters.
I'm sure civilizations will still evolve through play, or rather as play, since that seems to be a fundamental mechanism of our humanity.
Horses have made civilization possible.
Words are small shapes in the gorgeous chaos of the world. . . . they bring the world into focus, they corral ideas, they hone thoughts, they paint watercolors of perception.
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.
What a lonely species we are, searching for signals of life from other galaxies, adopting companion animals, visiting parks and zoos to commune with other beasts. In the process, we discover our shared identity.
Smell is the mute sense, the one without words.
Of all the errands life seems to be running, of all the mysteries that enchant us, love is my favorite
One of the things I like best about animals in the wild is that they're always off on some errand. They have appointments to keep. It's only we humans who wonder what we're here for.