Best Quotes by Diane Ackerman (Top 10)

  1. 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.
  2. Look at your feet. You are standing in the sky. When we think of the sky, we tend to look up, but the sky actually begins at the earth. We walk through it, yell into it, rake leaves, wash the dog, and drive cars in it. We breathe it deep within us. With every breath, we inhale millions of molecules of sky, heat them briefly, and then exhale them back into the world.
  3. 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.
  4. It began in mystery, and it will end in mystery, but what a savage and beautiful country lies in between.
  5. 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. The prism sets them free. Love is the white light of emotion.
  6. Wonder is the heaviest element on the periodic table. Even a tiny fleck of it stops time.
  7. Everyone admits that love is wonderful and necessary, yet no one agrees on just what it is.
  8. I don't want to be a passenger in my own life.
  9. When I go biking, I repeat a mantra of the day's sensations: bright sun, blue sky, warm breeze, blue jay's call, ice melting and so on. This helps me transcend the traffic, ignore the clamorings of work, leave all the mind theaters behind and focus on nature instead. I still must abide by the rules of the road, of biking, of gravity. But I am mentally far away from civilization. The world is breaking someone else's heart.
  10. 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.

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