Quotes from Diane Ackerman

Poetry is an act of distillation. It takes contingency samples, is selective. It telescopes time. It focuses what most often floods past us in a polite blur.

A poem records emotions and moods that lie beyond normal language, that can only be patched together and hinted at metaphorically.

Even without seeing the crickets, grasshoppers, cicadas and katydids, we hear them shrilling in this season and trust that they're the tiny living gargoyles entomologists claim.

The well of nature is full today. Time to go outside and take a drink.

Humans are the most successful invasives of all time.

The garden is a living, pulsing, singing, scratching, warring, erotic, and generally rowdy thing. I may find peace in its midst, but I regard it as a whole with many parts, a plural organism.

I'm certainly not opposed to digital technology, whose graces I daily enjoy and rely on in so many ways. But I worry about our virtual blinders.

I'm fascinated how often and with what whole-heartedness people will risk their lives to perform acts of courage, sacrifice, and compassion for total strangers.

habit, a particularly insidious thug who chokes passion and smothers love. Habit puts us on autopilot.

Love is the best school, but the tuition is high and the homework can be painful.

People search for love as if it were a city lost beneath the desert dunes, where pleasure is the law, the streets are lined with brocade cushions, and the sun never sets.

Love is like a batik created from many emotional colors, it is a fabric whose pattern and brightness may vary.

Touch seems to be as essential as sunlight.

Couples are jigsaw puzzles that hang together by touching in just enough points.

Like love, travel makes you innocent again.

Adventure is not something you travel to find. It's something you take with you, or you're not going to find it when you arrive.

Love, like truth, is the unassailable defense.

We ogle plants and animals up close on television, the Internet and in the movies. We may not worship the animals we see, but we still regard them as necessary physical and spiritual companions. Technological nature can't completely satisfy that yearning.

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.

Love is the white light of emotion.

Cicadas, buckling and unbuckling their stomach muscles, yield the sound of someone sharpening scissors. Fall field crickets, the thermometer hounds, add high-pitched tinkling chirps to the jazz, and their call quickens with warm weather, slows again with cool.

We're dabbling in eugenics all the time, breeding ideal crops to replace less aesthetic or nutritious or hardy varieties; leveling forests to graze cattle or erect shopping malls and condos; planting groves of a few familiar trees that homeowners and industries prefer.

hope and uncertainty [are] the twin ingredients necessary for romance to thrive. ... Nothing begins with so much excitement and hope, or fails as often, as love.

Of all the errands life seems to be running, of all the mysteries that enchant us, love is my favorite