352 Quotes by Diane Ackerman

After all, coffee is bitter, a flavor from the forbidden and dangerous realm.

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.

We tend to think of memories as monuments we once forged and may find intact beneath the weedy growth of years. But, in a real sense, memories are tied to and describe the present. Formed in an idiosyncratic way when they happened, they’re also true to the moment of recall, including how you feel, all you’ve experienced, and new values, passions, and vulnerability. One never steps into the same stream of consciousness twice.

Which is crueler, an old man’s lost memories of a life lived, or a young man’s lost memories of the life he meant to live?

Nature rarely wastes a winning strategy.

I suppose I try to be a translator of sorts, striving to translate emotion and vision into words, to express the life force of animals and landscapes, to give them voice. I pore over the lustrous details of nature and human nature. How different is this from a monk devoting his life to an illuminated manuscript?

We can’t enchant the world, which makes its own magic; but we can enchant ourselves by paying deep attention.

Germany’s crime is the greatest crime the world has ever known, because it is not on the scale of History: it is on the scale of Evolution.

Don’t just live the length of your life – live the width of it as well.