352 Quotes by Diane Ackerman

The heart is a museum, filled with the exhibits of a lifetime's loves.

What do those of us who aren't tall, flawlessly sculpted adolescents do? Answer: Console ourselves with how relative beauty can be... Thank heavens for the arousing qualities of zest, intelligence, wit, curiosity, sweetness, passion, talent and grace.

Couples are jigsaw puzzles that hang together by touching in just enough points. They're never total fits or misfits. In time, a pair invents its own commonwealth, complete with anthems, rituals, and lingos-a cult of two with fallible gods.

If a mind is just a few pounds of blood, urea, and electricity, how does it manage to contemplate itself, worry about its soul, do time-and-motion studies, admire the shy hooves of a goat, know that it will die, enjoy all the grand and lesser mayhems of the heart ?

Nature is also great fun. To pretend that nature isn't fun is to miss much of the joy of being alive.

We evolved as creatures knitted into the fabric of nature, and without its intimate truths, we can find ourselves unraveling.

Give a man enough rope and he'll wrap himself around your little finger.

Our relationship with nature has changed radically, irreversibly, but by no means all for the bad. Our new epoch is laced with invention. Our mistakes are legion, but our talent is immeasurable.

There is a way of beholding nature which is a form of prayer, a way of minding something with such clarity and aliveness that the rest of the world recedes. It . . . gives the brain a small vacation.