Diane Ackerman Quotes

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Diane Ackerman

Profession : Poet

Birth : October 7, 1948

Touch seems to be as essential as sunlight.

Diane Ackerman

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.

Diane Ackerman

Nothing is more memorable than a smell. One scent can be unexpected, momentary and fleeting, yet conjure up a childhood summer beside a lake in the mountains.

Diane Ackerman

Hurricane season brings a humbling reminder that, despite our technologies, most of nature remains unpredictable.

Diane Ackerman

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.

Diane Ackerman

We're losing biodiversity globally at an alarming rate, and we need a cornucopia of different plants and animals, for the planet's health and our own.

Diane Ackerman

Artificial intelligence is growing up fast, as are robots whose facial expressions can elicit empathy and make your mirror neurons quiver.

Diane Ackerman

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

Diane Ackerman

Success produces success, just as money produces money.

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

Diane Ackerman

Look in the mirror. The face that pins you with its double gaze reveals a chastening secret.

Diane Ackerman

Complexity excites the mind, and order rewards it. In the garden, one finds both, including vanishingly small orders too complex to spot, and orders so vast the mind struggles to embrace them.

Diane Ackerman

I don't want to be a passenger in my own life.

Diane Ackerman

I've always found it best to have a routine. I go to my study at the same time every day and climb into my bay window. I may not be inspired every day, but on the days I am, I need to be in place to write. If I'm not particularly inspired, I'll revise or do research or correspondence.

Diane Ackerman

What a lonely species we are, searching for signals of life from other galaxies, adopting companion animals, visiting parks and zoos to commune with other beasts. In the process, we discover our shared identity.

Diane Ackerman

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

Diane Ackerman

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.

Diane Ackerman

In the winter, I enjoy cross-country skiing and raising orchids and amaryllises. If I could grow tropical flowers as perennials, I would, especially hibiscus and mandavilla.

Diane Ackerman

The further we distance ourselves from the spell of the present, explored by our senses, the harder it will be to understand and protect nature's precarious balance, let alone the balance of our own human nature.

Diane Ackerman