Quotes from Diane Ackerman

For centuries, Poland had granted asylum to Jews fleeing persecution in England, France, Germany, and Spain. Some twelfth-century Polish coins even bear Hebrew inscriptions, and one legend has it that Jews found Poland attractive because the country's name sounded like the Hebrew imperative po lin (rest here).

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

A perfect balance is possible to imagine, but impossible to reach, so one is always trembling along an arc from too excited to too bored and back again. Everything we love most—be it sweetheart or flower—looks majestic because it seems to be trembling out of balance. While

Weightlessness makes astronauts lose taste and smell in space. In the absence of gravity, molecules cannot be volatile, so few of them get into our noses deeply enough to register as odors. This is a problem for nutritionists designing space food.

One of Frank's key tasks was to kill all people of influence, such as teachers, priests, landowners, politicians, lawyers, and artists. Then he began rearranging huge masses of the population: over a span of five years, 860,000 Poles would be uprooted and resettled; 75,000 Germans would take over their lands; 1,300,000 Poles would be shipped to Germany as slave labor; and 330,000 would simply be shot. With

Yet 70,000–90,000 people in Warsaw and the suburbs, or about one-twelfth of the city's population, risked their lives to help neighbors escape. Besides the rescuers and Underground helpers, there were maids, postmen, milkmen, and many others who didn't inquire about extra faces or extra mouths to feed.

The etymology of the Hebrew word for prophet, navi, combines three processes: navach (to cry out), nava (to gush or flow), and navuv (to be hollow). The task of this meditation was to open the heart, to unclog the channel between the infinite and the mortal, and rise into a state of rapture known as mochin gadlut, Great Mind.

T]here is only one zot, thisness. Zot is a feminine word for this. The word zot is itself one of the names of God—the thisness of what is. The

Today, instead of adapting to the natural world in which we live, we've created a human environment in which we've embedded the natural world.

Seres tan encariñados con su libertad como los seres humanos saben cómo volver a plantear casi cualquier tema. Si hay una cosa en la que realmente nos mostramos magistrales, es en empujar los límites, inventar estrategias, encontrar caminos para rodear las verdades más impías, tomar a la vida por las solapas y sacudirla sin piedad. Es cierto que la vida tiende a devolver los golpes, pero eso nunca ha bastado para deternos.

There are also natural wonders, sacred because they magnetize people, wrench from them profound feelings of awe and fright. What is sacred goes far beyond the religious.

a remarkable example of Nazi zoophilia is that a leading biologist was once punished for not giving worms enough anesthesia during an experiment.

Poetry is a kind of knowing, a way of looking at the ordinary until it becomes special and the exceptional until it becomes commonplace.

They desperately needed hope that a safe haven even existed, that the war's horrors would one day end, while they drifted along in the strange villa even its owners referred to as an ark.

would escape to his own private planet, Ro, where an imaginary astronomer friend, Zi, had finally succeeded in building a machine to convert radiant sunlight into moral strength. Using it to waft peace throughout the universe, Zi

In her diary she described Tuzinka as a giant bundle, the largest baby animal she'd ever seen, weighing in at 242 pounds

Rescuers tended to be decisive, fast-thinking, risk-taking, independent, adventurous, openhearted, rebellious, and unusually flexible—able to switch plans, abandon habits, or change ingrained routines at a moment's notice. They tended to be nonconformists, and though many rescuers held solemn principles worth dying for, they didn't regard themselves as heroic.

I build your robust image, knowing nothing of the woman   whose heart you rent, if your conscience scolds, or regret bites,   the frets, the dreams you dream awake, the sirens that rouse you in the night.

Most people know that 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.

referred to the Ghetto, a Yiddish term, sitre akhre, for the dim world where demons dwell and zombies wear a husk or shell that has grown up around a spark of holiness, masking its light.

She had a very traditional Catholic upbringing and that didn't deter her. On the contrary it strengthened her determination to be true to herself, to follow her heart, even though it meant enduring a lot of self-sacrifice. Intrigued

he ceased to exist for a long time, living among friends but gaunt and ghostly, one of the disappeared. He had lost many voices: the lawyer's, the impresario's, the lover's, and it isn't surprising that he found speaking or even coherence difficult.

It's not enough to do research from a distance. It's by living beside animals that you learn their behavior and psychology. On

Marek Edelman in Krall, Shielding the Flame. After the war Edelman became a cardiologist, commenting that when one knows death so well, one has more responsibility for life. Chapter