Quotes from Diane Ackerman

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.

Look in the mirror. The face that pins you with its double gaze reveals a chastening secret.

We embrace two-legged beings, and can warm to four-legged beings, too, but for most people, six legs is pushing it. Most don't need multi-eyed, antennaed face time.

We live on the leash of our senses. There is no way in which to understand the world without first detecting it through the radar-net of our senses.

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...

We evolved as creatures knitted into the fabric of nature, and without its intimate truths, we can find ourselves unraveling.

Nature is also great fun. To pretend that nature isn't fun is to miss much of the joy of being alive.

Poetry reminds us of the truths about life and human nature that we knew all along, but forgot somehow because they weren't yet in memorable language.

The more we exile ourselves from nature, the more we crave its miracle waters.

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.

Living with anyone for many years takes skill. To keep peace in the household, couples learn to adapt to one another, hopefully in positive ways.

Who you are isn't tied solely to what you say, even though it may feel that way to you now.

I consider fiction a very high-class form of lying. I enjoy and admire it enormously, but I don't think I'm very good at it.

We live on the leash of our senses.

I'm sure civilizations will still evolve through play, or rather as play, since that seems to be a fundamental mechanism of our humanity.

My mother always said I must be part Mongolian because of my lotus-pale complexion and squid-ink black hair.

Writing is my form of celebration and prayer.

There is a way of beholding nature which is a form of prayer, a way of minding something with such clarity and aliveness that the rest of the world recedes. It . . . gives the brain a small vacation.

Gardeners may create order briefly out of chaos, but nature always gets the last word, and what it says is usually untidy by human standards. But I find all states of nature beautiful, and because I want to delight in my garden, not rule it, I just accept my yen to tame the chaos on one day and let the Japanese beetles run riot on the next.

Our relationship with nature has changed radically, irreversibly, but by no means all for the bad. Our new epoch is laced with invention. Our mistakes are legion, but our talent is immeasurable.

the biggest threat to the religious experience may well come from organized religion itself.

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

Look at your feet. You are standing in the sky. When we think of the sky, we tend to look up, but the sky actually begins at the earth.

Look in the mirror. The face that pins you with its double gaze reveals a chastening secret.