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.
So often loneliness comes from being out of touch with parts of oneself. We go searching for those parts in other people, but there's a difference between feeling separate from others and separate from oneself.
Couples are jigsaw puzzles that hang together by touching in just enough points.
Home is where the heart is, we say, rubbing the flint of one abstraction against another.
Life becomes a lot simpler for a creative person when he or she finds the routine that works best. . . . get in the habit of going through the routine every day, and on some of those days, you're going to be lucky and have done some good work. . . . Go to your study, close the door, invent your confidence.
Wonder is the heaviest element on the periodic table. Even a tiny fleck of it stops time.
So before I start work on a book, I'm like a pregnant mole - I obsessively tidy and order my closets and everything in my study. Because there's such a cascade of images and ideas that I'm grapping with mentally, I couldn't also be in a chaotic setting.
Though we marry as adults, we don't marry adults. We marry children who have grown up and still rejoice in being children, especially if we're creative.
All relationships change the brain - but most important are the intimate bonds that foster or fail us, altering the delicate circuits that shape memories, emotions and that ultimate souvenir, the self.
There is a furnace in our cells, and when we breathe we pass the world through our bodies, brew it lightly, and turn it loose again, gently altered for having known us.
Mystery causes a mental itch, which the brain tries to soothe with the balm of reasonable talk.
. . . 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.
Love is the white light of emotion.
I swear I will not dishonor my soul with hatred, but offer myself humbly as a guardian of nature, as a healer of misery, as a messenger of wonder, as an architect of peace.
Not much is known about alligators. They don't train well. And they're unwieldy and rowdy to work with in laboratories.
Nothing reveals more about the inner life of a people than their arts.
Nature is also great fun. To pretend that nature isn't fun is to miss much of the joy of being alive.
Writer's block is a luxury most people with deadlines don't have.
Above all, we ask the poet to teach us a way of seeing.
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.
Which is crueler, an old man's lost memories of a life lived, or a young man's lost memories of the life he meant to live?