Quotes by Diane Ackerman

About Diane Ackerman:

Diane Ackerman is an American poet, essayist, and naturalist known for her wide-ranging curiosity and poetic explorations of the natural world.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

Habitats keep evolving new pageants of species, and we shouldn't interfere.

Diane Ackerman

When a hurricane thrashes the mid-Atlantic, my hilly town often reaps the fringe of the storm. The rain starts blowing sideways, and sometimes we see hail the size of purie marbles.

Diane Ackerman

Like many animals, wild ponies can sense a drop in barometric pressure. When a storm threatens, they know to seek shelter in hilly areas and huddle together with their rumps facing the oncoming wind.

Diane Ackerman

We tend to think of heroes only in terms of violent combat, whether it's against enemies or a natural disaster. But human beings also perform radical acts of compassion; we just don't talk about them, or we don't talk about them as much.

Diane Ackerman

When all is said and done, we exist only in relation to the world, and our senses evolved as scouts who bridge that divide and provide volumes of information, warnings and rewards.

Diane Ackerman

Why was it, she asked herself, that "animals can sometimes subdue their predatory ways in only a few months, while humans, despite centuries of refinement, can quickly grow more savage than any beast?

Diane Ackerman

Our mistakes are legion, but our talent is immeasurable.

Diane Ackerman

It began in mystery and it will end in mystery, but what a rare and beautiful country lies in between.

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

Knee-deep in the cosmic overwhelm, I’m stricken by the ricochet wonder of it all: the plain everythingness of everything, in cahoots with the everythingness of everything else. - From Diffraction (for Carl Sagan)

Diane Ackerman

How can love's spaciousness be conveyed in the narrow confines of one syllable?

Diane Ackerman

Wonder is the heaviest element on the periodic table. Even a tiny fleck of it stops time.

Diane Ackerman

We're dabbling in eugenics all the time, breeding ideal crops to replace less aesthetic or nutritious or hardy varieties; leveling forests to graze cattle or erect shopping malls and condos; planting groves of a few familiar trees that homeowners and...

Diane Ackerman

Though not a natural world by any means, more like a collection of living dioramas, a zoo exists in its own time zone, somewhere between the seasonal sense of animals and our madly ticking watch time.

Diane Ackerman

We embrace two-legged beings, and can warm to four-legged beings, too, but for most people, six legs is pushing it. Most don't need multi-eyed, antennaed face time.

Diane Ackerman

Even without seeing the crickets, grasshoppers, cicadas and katydids, we hear them shrilling in this season and trust that they're the tiny living gargoyles entomologists claim.

Diane Ackerman

The simple, stupefying truth that, as a woman, I am a minute ocean, in the dark tropic of whose womb eggs lay coded as roe, floating in the sea that wet-nursed us all, moved me deeply.

Diane Ackerman

Success produces success, just as money produces money.

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

Because we can't escape our ancient hunger to live close to nature, we encircle the house with lawns and gardens, install picture windows, adopt pets and Boston ferns, and scent everything that touches our lives.

Diane Ackerman

Nature is more like a seesaw than a crystal, a never-ending conga line of bold moves and corrections.

Diane Ackerman

Author Bio

  • NameDiane Ackerman
  • DescriptionAuthor, poet, naturalist
  • BornOctober 7, 1948
  • CountryUnited States Of America
  • ProfessionPoet; Author
  • AwardsGuggenheim Fellowship