I don’t want to get to the end of my life and find that I have just lived the length of it. I want to have lived the width of it as well.
—Diane Ackerman
Topics: Living, Life, Carpe-diem, Nature
We live on the leash of our senses.
—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; another, a moonlit beach; a third, a family dinner of pot roast and sweet potatoes during a myrtle-mad August in a Midwestern town. Smells detonate softly in our memory like poignant land mines hidden under the weedy mass of years. Hit a tripwire of smell and memories explode all at once. A complex vision leaps out of the undergrowth.
—Diane Ackerman
Topics: Memory
A poem records emotions and moods that lie beyond normal language, that can only be patched together and hinted at metaphorically.
—Diane Ackerman
Topics: Poetry, Poets
After all, coffee is bitter, a flavor from the forbidden and dangerous realm.
—Diane Ackerman
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
—Diane Ackerman
Who would deduce the dragonfly from the larva, the iris from the bud, the lawyer from the infant? We are all shape-shifters and magical reinventors. Life is really a plural noun, a caravan of selves.
—Diane Ackerman
Uncertainty is the essence of romance.
—Diane Ackerman
Words are small shapes in the gorgeous chaos of the world; shapes that bring the world into focus, corral ideas, hone thoughts. They paint watercolors of perception.
—Diane Ackerman
Everyone admits that love is wonderful and necessary, yet no one agrees on just what it is.
—Diane Ackerman
Topics: Love
It began in mystery, and it will end in mystery, but what a savage and beautiful country lies in between.
—Diane Ackerman
Topics: Country, Discovery
There is no way in which to understand the world without first detecting it through the radar-net of our senses.
—Diane Ackerman
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- e. e. cummings American Poet, Writer, Painter
- Nikki Giovanni American Poet, Writer
- Elizabeth Prentiss American Children’s Books Writer
- Shel Silverstein American Cartoonist, Author
- Marie Chapian American Christian Writer
- Isaac Asimov American Novelist, Critic, Popular Scientist
- Carl Sandburg American Poet, Historian
- Phyllis McGinley American Children’s Books Writer
- James Whitcomb Riley American Children’s Books Writer
- May Sarton American Children’s Books Writer
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