“ When I set a glass prism on a windowsill and allow the sun to flood through it, a spectrum of colors dances on the floor. What we call "white" is a rainbow of colored rays packed into a small space. T… Diane Ackerman
“ In our heart we know that life loves life. Yet we feast on some of the other life-forms with which we share our planet; we kill to live. Taste is what carries us across that rocky moral terrain, what… Diane Ackerman
“ Still, though no one is an island, most are peninsulas. Our lives wouldn't make sense without personal memories pinned like butterflies against the velvet backdrop of social history. Diane Ackerman
“ We tend to think of memories as monuments we once forged and may find intact beneath the weedy growth of years. But, in a real sense, memories are tied to and describe the present. Formed in an idiosy… Diane Ackerman
“ 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 attribut… Diane Ackerman
“ It began in mystery, and it will end in mystery, but what a savage and beautiful country lies in between. Diane Ackerman
“ Love is the great intangible. In our nightmares, we can create beasts out of pure emotion. Hate stalks the streets with dripping fangs, fear flies down narrow alleyways on leather wings, and jealousy… Diane Ackerman
“ Anticipating their calamity and fright when deportation day came (August 6, 1942) he [Henryk Goldszmit, pen name: Janusz Korczak] joined them aboard the train bound for Treblinka, because, he said, he… Diane Ackerman
“ One morning as I closed the cyclone-fence gate / to begin a slow drift / down to the cookhouse on foot / (because my truck wheels were glued / in deep mud once again), / I walked straight into / the w… Diane Ackerman
“ Knee-deep in the cosmic overwhelm, I’m strickenby the ricochet wonder of it all: the plaineverythingness of everything, in cahootswith the everythingness of everything else.- From Diffraction (for Car… Diane Ackerman
“ The sensory misers will inherit the earth, but first they will make it not worth living on. When you consider something like death, after which we may well go out like a candle flame, then it probably… Diane Ackerman
“ The faint pink coating the treetops promised rippling buds, a sure sign of spring hastening in, right on schedule, and the animal world getting ready for its fiesta of courting and mating, dueling and… Diane Ackerman
“ 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. Diane Ackerman
“ Frantic and serene, vigilant and calm, wrung-out and fortified, explosive and sedate—love commands a vast army of moods. Hoping for victory, limping from the latest skirmish, lovers enter the arena on… Diane Ackerman
“ Metaphor isn't just decorative language. If it were, it wouldn't scare us so much. . . . Colorful language threatens some people, who associate it, I think, with a kind of eroticism (playing with lang… Diane Ackerman
“ Suffering took hold of me like a magic spell abolishing all differences between friends and strangers. Diane Ackerman
“ Europe enjoyed a heritage of fairy tales alive with talking animals--some almost real, other deliciously bogus-- to spark child's fantasies and gallop grownups to the cherished haunts of childhood. It… Diane Ackerman
“ I was moving in a narrow range between busy distractedness and a pervasive sadness whose granules seemed to enter each cell, weighing it down... I ghosted between islands of anxiety... a fatigue that… Diane Ackerman
