Quotes from Diane Ackerman

We are the same and not the same, uniquely other, but with pages of shared history.

What sort of stewards of the future planet will today's digital children be?

The Underground Peasant Movement adopted the slogan of As little, as late, and as bad as possible, and set about sabotaging deliveries to Germans and diverting supplies to people in the cities

In September 2013, the panel of 209 lead authors and 600 contributing authors, from 39 nations, poring over 9,200 scientific publications, came to these landmark conclusions: global warming is "unequivocal," sea levels are rising, ice packs are melting, and if we continue at this pace we "will cause further warming and changes in all components of the climate." However, they added, we can slow the process down if we begin at once.

They spend their whole lives yelling at the world and each other. They yell at their loved ones, they yell at their enemies, they yell at their dinner, they yell at the big bustling world.

doing and not doing, everyone's conscience finds its

Pagans exalt sacred things, the Prophets extol sacred deeds

I praise my destroyer, and will continue praising until hours run like mercury through my fingers, hope flares a final time in the last throes of innocence, and all the coins of sense are spent.

Strolling through Bia?owieza's mass of life, one would never guess the role it played in Lutz Heck's ambitions, the Warsaw Zoo's fate, and the altruistic opportunism of Jan and Antonina, who capitalized on the Nazis' obsession with prehistoric animals and a forest primeval to rescue scores of endangered neighbors and friends.

Irena Sendler (code name Jolanta) described it. A Christian doctor's daughter with many Jewish friends, she reconfigured her job at the Social Welfare Department, recruited ten like-minded others, and began issuing false documents with forged signatures.

any illness that kills one animal threatens to wipe out all (91): This curse of closely knit species also applies to our dairy cows, now almost clones of one another; an illness that kills one can kill all.

and pleasure? What is it that I am tasting?' The most eloquent rabbi and writer of Hasidic mysticism, Abraham Joshua Heschel, left Warsaw in 1939 to become an important

If an expectant mother stepped over a rope on the ground or under a clothesline, the umbilical cord would tangle during childbirth. Mothers-to-be should

How I long to hold your face like a bouquet and inhale the mysterious scent of your dreams when the summer grass is green as a dye.

How could anyone reconcile the agony of the Holocaust with Hasidism, a dancing religion that teaches love, joy, and celebration?

Kiddush ha-Shem, the principle of service to God, acquired a new definition in the Ghetto, where it became the struggle to preserve life in the face of destruction.

Before annihilation comes an exile from Nature, and then only through wonder and transcendence, the Ghetto rabbi taught, may one combat the psychic disintegration of everyday life.

Heinz Heck wrote after the war that he and his brother had begun the back-breeding project out of curiosity, but also from the thought that if man cannot be halted in his mad destruction of himself and other creatures, it is at least a consolation if some of those kinds of animals he has already exterminated can be brought back to life again.

in doing the finite [we] may perceive the infinite.

Even though the Underground then spread news of Treblinka, some people argued the Nazis wouldn't visit the same bestiality on a city as important as Warsaw.

30 to 40 percent of the world's Jews were killed during World War II, but not that 80 to 90 percent of the Orthodox community perished, among them many who had kept alive an ancient tradition of mysticism and meditation reaching back to the Old Testament world of the prophets.

30 to 40 percent of the world's Jews were killed during World War II, but not that 80 to 90 percent of the Orthodox community perished

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.

Antonina woke in the night to help midwife an animal like a giraffe (always tricky because the mother gives birth standing up, the calf falls headfirst, and the mother doesn't want help anyway). This