352 Quotes by Diane Ackerman

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

Revered as God’s servants, the bees they lure provide mead and honey for the table and beeswax candles for church services, which is why many churches planted linden trees in their courtyards. The bee-church connection became so strong that once, at the turn of the fifteenth century, the villagers of Mazowsze passed a law condemning honey thieves and hive vandals.

Happiness doesn’t require laughter, only well-being and a sense that the world is breaking someone else’s heart, not mine.

So before I start work on a book, I’m like a pregnant mole – I obsessively tidy and order my closets and everything in my study. Because there’s such a cascade of images and ideas that I’m grapping with mentally, I couldn’t also be in a chaotic setting.

All our senses feed the brain, and if it diets mainly on cruelty and suffering, how can it remain healthy?

The knowing, I told myself, is only a vapor of the mind, and yet it can wreck havok with one’s sanity.

If organs as elemental as brain and heart can be persuaded to regenerate, and others, like ears and corneas, can be fashioned from living ink, how will that change us as a species? Will the printing of organs affect our evolution? Could it alter our genes?

Only by fumbling with countless bits of knowledge, and then ignoring most of it, does a creative mind craft something original.

The Underground Peasant Movement adopted the slogan of “As little, as late, and as bad as possible,” and set about sabotaging deliveries.