Diane Ackerman
Diane Ackerman
Diane Ackermanis an American poet, essayist, and naturalist known for her wide-ranging curiosity and poetic explorations of the natural world...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth7 October 1948
CountryUnited States of America
missing-you sweet falling-in-love
Everyone admits that love is wonderful and necessary, yet no one agrees on just what it is.
philosophy medicine perception
We live on the leash of our senses.
horse civilization made
Horses have made civilization possible.
spiritual stars love-life
I'm an Earth ecstatic, and my creed is simple: All life is sacred, life loves life, and we are capable of improving our behavior toward one another. As basic as that is, for me it's also tonic and deeply spiritual, glorifying the smallest life-form and embracing the most distant stars.
running love-is errands
Of all the errands life seems to be running, of all the mysteries that enchant us, love is my favorite
struggle garden order
Complexity excites the mind, and order rewards it. In the garden, one finds both, including vanishingly small orders too complex to spot, and orders so vast the mind struggles to embrace them.
self birth odd
What an odd, ruminating, noisy, self-interrupting conversation we conduct with ourselves from birth to death.
prayer writing celebration
Writing is my form of celebration and prayer.
sex latin names
Devising a vocabulary for gardening is like devising a vocabulary for sex. There are the correct Latin names, but most people invent euphemisms. Those who refer to plants by Latin name are considered more expert, if a little pedantic.
happiness laughter heart
Happiness doesn't require laughter, only well-being and a sense that the world is breaking someone else's heart, not mine.
country eye animal
Though most of us don't hunt, our eyes are still the great monopolists of our senses. To taste or touch your enemy or your food, you have to be unnervingly close to it. To smell or hear it, you can risk being further off. But vision can rush through the fields and up the mountains, travel across time, country, and parsecs of outer space, and collect bushel baskets of information as it goes. Animals that hear high frequencies better than we do
memories men young
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?
mean passion giving
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.
memories radio faces
I watched her face switch among the radio stations of memory