Diane Ackerman Quotes - Page 8

As people flock to urban centers where ground space is limited, cities with green walls and roofs and skyscraper farms offer improved health and well-being, renewable resources, reliable food supply, and relief to the environment.

Choice is a signature of our species.

After all, coffee is bitter, a flavor from the forbidden and dangerous realm.

Flight is nothing but an attitude in motion.

My mother always said I must be part Mongolian because of my lotus-pale complexion and squid-ink black hair.

We try to exile ourselves more and more from nature - not always consciously: We build houses; we dismiss nature; nature has to be outside, because we're inside. God forbid something like a cockroach comes inside, or some dust.

Writing is my form of celebration and prayer.

Living with anyone for many years takes skill. To keep peace in the household, couples learn to adapt to one another, hopefully in positive ways.

Which is crueler, an old man's lost memories of a life lived, or a young man's lost memories of the life he meant to live?

Though most of us don't hunt, our eyes are still the great monopolists of our senses. To taste or touch your enemy or your food, you have to be unnervingly close to it. To smell or hear it, you can risk being further off. But vision can rush through the fields and up the mountains, travel across time, country, and parsecs of outer space, and collect bushel baskets of information as it goes. Animals that hear high frequencies better than we do

We have vexed and bothered every plant and every animal on every continent.

Mystery causes a mental itch, which the brain tries to soothe with the balm of reasonable talk.

In the early years of the Uprising, we survived on one meal a day of horse meat and soup, but by the end we ate only dried peas, dogs, cats and birds.

It's animal by animal that you save a species.

Nothing reveals more about the inner life of a people than their arts.

Adult bats don't weigh much. They're mainly fur and appetite.

Not much is known about alligators. They don't train well. And they're unwieldy and rowdy to work with in laboratories.

... love is an act of sedition, a revolt against reason, an uprising in the body politic, a private mutiny.

Despite not knowing if what he felt from moment to moment would pass or last forever, he entered fully into his shifting states of violent rage, self-pity, longing, heartbreak, cynicism, without losing the ability to think about what was happening to him. That took courage, I thought, living with the suffering in a mindful way, as an artifact of being, neither good nor bad.

Our sense of safety depends on predictability, so anything living outside the usual rules we suspect to be an outlaw, a ghoul.

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.

the biggest threat to the religious experience may well come from organized religion itself.