352 Quotes by Diane Ackerman

Not much is known about alligators. They don’t train well. And they’re unwieldy and rowdy to work with in laboratories.

The great affair, the love affair with life, is to live as variously as possible, to groom one’s curiosity like a high-spirited thoroughbred, climb aboard, and gallop over the thick, sunstruck hills every day.

I try to give myself passionately, totally, to whatever I’m observing, with as much affectionate curiosity as I can muster, as a means of understanding a little better what being human is.

We did it because it was the right thing to do.

We carry the ocean within us; our veins mirror the tides.

Because poets feel what we’re afraid to feel, venture where we’re reluctant to go, we learn from their journeys without taking the same dramatic risks.

But, without meaning to exactly, one still tends to conjure up scary scenarios, their pathos or salvation, as if one could endure a trauma before it occurred, in small manageable doses, as a sort of inoculation. Are there homeopathic degrees of anguish?

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.

One of the things I like best about animals in the wild is that they’re always off on some errand. They have appointments to keep. It’s only we humans who wonder what we’re here for.