Quotes from Diane Ackerman

Myself, I've always been organized in waves. For months on end, slowly descending into disorder, I drift with the status quo. Then I wake up one morning with a sudden compulsion to color-code my socks or stack them vertically.

I believe consciousness is brazenly physical, a raucous mirage the brain creates to help us survive. But I also sense the universe is magical, greater than the sum of its parts, which I don't attribute to a governing god, but simply to the surprising, ecstatic, frightening everyday reality we all know. Ultimately, I find consciousness a fascinating predicament for matter to get into.

Suffering took hold of me like a magic spell abolishing all differences between friends and strangers.

Below us somewhere in the gelatinous phantasmagoria of churning blue, the whales wouldn't be much aware of the storm.

Alligators have beautiful undulating skin, which feels dense, spongy, solid, like the best eraser.

Antonina felt convinced that people needed to connect more with their animal nature, but also that animals long for human company, reach out for human attention.

How do you retain a spirit of affection and humor in a crazed, homicidal, unpredictable society?

Rainer Maria Rilke] speaks of absorbing Earth's phenomena with the full frenzy of human relish and insight as our destiny: It is our task to imprint this temporary, perishable earth into ourselves so deeply, so painfully and passionately, that its essence can rise again... We are the bees of the invisible... [Our work is] the continual conversion of the beloved visible and tangible world into the invisible vibrations and agitation of our own nature.

As fleeting emotions stalk it, a face can leak fear or the guilt of a forming lie.

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.

Out of the blue, Paul reported feeling bouts of calm euphoria, a mystical sense of all's-right-with-his-life-and-the-universe, a bright future in sight. ... I knew well the state of vigorous calm he meant, a frequent visitor throughout my own life. [p. 290]

Words are small shapes in the gorgeous chaos of the world. But they are shapes, they bring the world into focus, they corral ideas, they hone thoughts, they paint watercolors of perception.

Everyone admits that love is wonderful and necessary, yet no one agrees on just what it is.

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

Much of life becomes background, but it is the province of art to throw buckets of light into the shadows and make life a new again.

Much more. We're joined at the heart. Bad luck for you, I'm afraid. My ticker's pretty wonky. Too much boozing. His eyes twinkled, and he drew me close. Not enough kissling.

It's like having a head full of holes, in which the perfect repository of words have shamed themselves, he lamented.

We carry the ocean within us; our veins mirror the tides.

Our days flowed around well-charted, often traveled courses, and yet, the underlying sense of falling out of time, out of the trajectory of one's life, not by choice, but by subtraction, was frequent and disquieting. Then I grieved for him, for the lost and previous Paul. He grieved for that man too. Both our griefs were mainly private, internal, unuttered. Return was impossible, and there was only one direction open ; and so we kept our compass pointed forward. [p. 286]

Must be I find you tough and lusty as the life, all toil and tempo, finesse and plain fight, with values so old they startle me. Must be I think of you as I do the rugged flowers that prove themselves over and over in the spring, that elsewhere might perish, but here master the earth, bloom into gangly lives of high color, and inhale the sun, knowing the land better than the land does. Hardy, savvy, they will outlive us all.

Couples are jigsaw puzzles that hang together by touching in just enough points. They're never total fits or misfits. ... We marry children who have grown up and still rejoice in being children .... [p. 15]

We marry children who have grown up and still rejoice in being children, especially if we're creative. Imaginative people fidget with ideas, including the idea of a relationship. If they're wordsmiths like us, they fidget a lot in words.

I'd suffered many losses in recent years after my father mother uncle aunt and cousin had all passed away. In her final years my mother often lamented that there was no one alive who had known her as a girl and I was starting to understand how spooked she'd felt. I wasn't sure I could take any more abandonments. One succumbs so easily to mind spasms, worry spasms. [p. 95]

But who can say why two people become a couple, that small principality of mutual protection and regard? Couples are jigsaw puzzles that hang together by touching in just enough points.