352 Quotes by Diane Ackerman

The more we exile ourselves from nature, the more we crave its miracle waters.

As anyone who has received or dispensed psychotherapy knows, it's a profession whose mainspring is love. Nearly everyone who visits a therapist has a love disorder of one sort or another, and each has a story to tell - of love lost or denied, love twisted or betrayed, love perverted or shackled to violence. Broken attachments litter the office floors like pick-up sticks. People appear with frayed seams and spilling pockets.

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.

Though we marry as adults, we don't marry adults. We marry children who have grown up and still rejoice in being children, especially if we're creative.

Above all, we ask the poet to teach us a way of seeing...

Words are small shapes in the gorgeous chaos of the world. ... they bring the world into focus, they corral ideas, they hone thoughts, they paint watercolors of perception.

Culture is what people invent when they have lost nature.

For the longest time I didn't realize I was creative - I just thought I was strange.

I consider fiction a very high-class form of lying. I enjoy and admire it enormously, but I don't think I'm very good at it.