352 Quotes by Diane Ackerman

Music, the perfume of hearing, probably began as a religious act, to arouse groups of people.

But who can say why two people become a couple, that small principality of mutual protection and regard? Couples are jigsaw puzzles that hang together by touching in just enough points.

Adventure is not something you travel to find. It’s something you take with you, or you’re not going to find it when you arrive.

One of the keystones of romantic love – and also of the ecstatic religion practiced by mystics – is the powerful desire to become one with the beloved.

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.

I don’t want to be a passenger in my own life.

A self is a frightening thing to waste, it’s the lens through which one’s whole life is viewed, and few people are willing to part with it, in death, or even imaginatively, in art.

Because IQ tests favor memory skills and logic, overlooking artistic creativity, insight, resiliency, emotional reserves, sensory gifts, and life experience, they can’t really predict success, let alone satisfaction.

We ask the poet to reassure us by giving us a geometry of living, in which all things add up and cohere, to tell us how things buttress once another, circle round and intermelt.