Top 160 Diane Ackerman Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Love, like truth, is the unassailable defense.”

— Diane Ackerman

52. “We live on the leash of our senses.”

— Diane Ackerman

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

— Diane Ackerman

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

— Diane Ackerman

55. “The only and absolute perfect union of two is when a baby hangs suspended in its mother’s womb, like a tiny madman in a padded cell, attached to her, feeling her blood and hormones, and moods play through its body, feeling her feelings.”

— Diane Ackerman

56. “I don’t understand all the fuss. If any creature is in danger, you save it, human or animal.”

— Diane Ackerman

57. “Violets smell like burnt sugar cubes that have been dipped in lemon and velvet.”

— Diane Ackerman

58. “Success produces success, just as money produces money.”

— Diane Ackerman

59. “Shaped a little like a loaf of French country bread, our brain is a crowded chemistry lab, bustling with nonstop neural conversations.”

— Diane Ackerman

60. “Couples are jigsaw puzzles that hang together by touching in just enough points. They’re never total fits or misfits. In time, a pair invents its own commonwealth, complete with anthems, rituals, and lingos-a cult of two with fallible gods.”

— Diane Ackerman

61. “Not long ago the world looked on the dark ages with contempt for its brutality, yet here it is again, in full force, a lawless sadism unpolished by all the charms of religion and civilization.” Sitting.”

— Diane Ackerman

62. “Look at your feet. You are standing in the sky. When we think of the sky, we tend to look up, but the sky actually begins at the earth. We walk through it, yell into it, rake leaves, wash the dog, and drive cars in it. We breathe it deep within us. With every breath, we inhale millions of molecules of sky, heat them briefly, and then exhale them back into the world.”

— Diane Ackerman

63. “Everyone admits that love is wonderful and necessary, yet no one agrees on just what it is.”

— Diane Ackerman

64. “How do you retain a spirit of affection and humor in a crazed, homicidal, unpredictable society?”

— Diane Ackerman

65. “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.”

— Diane Ackerman

66. “The visual image is a kind of tripwire for the emotions.”

— Diane Ackerman

67. “Much of life becomes background, but it is the province of art to throw buckets of light into the shadows and make life new again.”

— Diane Ackerman

68. “For me, life offers so many complexly appealing moments that two beautiful objects may be equally beautiful for different reasons and at different times. How can one choose?”

— Diane Ackerman

69. “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.”

— Diane Ackerman

70. “For if I do something, I never do it thoughtlessly.”

— Diane Ackerman

71. “There is a furnace in our cells, and when we breathe we pass the world through our bodies, brew it lightly, and turn it loose again, gently altered for having known us.”

— Diane Ackerman

72. “Of all the errands life seems to be running, of all the mysteries that enchant us, love is my favorite.”

— Diane Ackerman

73. “Europe enjoyed a heritage of fairy tales alive with talking animals – some almost real, other deliciously bogus – to spark child’s fantasies and gallop grownups to the cherished haunts of childhood. It pleased Antonina that her zoo offered on orient of fabled creatures, where book pages sprang alive and people could parley with ferocious animals.”

— Diane Ackerman

74. “History is an agreed-upon fiction.”

— Diane Ackerman

75. “I watched her face switch among the radio stations of memory.”

— Diane Ackerman

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

— Diane Ackerman

77. “Our sense of safety depends on predictability, so anything living outside the usual rules we suspect to be an outlaw, a ghoul.”

— Diane Ackerman

78. “Human beings are sloshing sacks of chemicals on the move.”

— Diane Ackerman

79. “It’s not enough to do research from a distance. It’s by living beside animals that you learn their behavior and psychology.”

— Diane Ackerman

80. “Choice is a signature of our species.”

— Diane Ackerman

81. “What an odd, ruminating, noisy, self-interrupting conversation we conduct with ourselves from birth to death.”

— Diane Ackerman

82. “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?”

— Diane Ackerman

83. “Nature is also great fun. To pretend that nature isn’t fun is to miss much of the joy of being alive.”

— Diane Ackerman

84. “Hit a tripwire of smell and memories explode all at once. A complex vision leaps out of the undergrowth.”

— Diane Ackerman

85. “Our relationship with nature has changed radically, irreversibly, but by no means all for the bad. Our new epoch is laced with invention. Our mistakes are legion, but our talent is immeasurable.”

— Diane Ackerman

86. “Poetry is an act of distillation. It takes contingency samples, is selective. It telescopes time. It focuses what most often floods past us in a polite blur.”

— Diane Ackerman

87. “I’m fascinated how often and with what whole-heartedness people will risk their lives to perform acts of courage, sacrifice, and compassion for total strangers.”

— Diane Ackerman

88. “As fleeting emotions stalk it, a face can leak fear or the guilt of a forming lie.”

— Diane Ackerman

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

— Diane Ackerman

90. “Our skin is what stands between us and the world.”

— Diane Ackerman

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

— Diane Ackerman

92. “There was nothing to do but wait. It is always like this for naturalists, and for poets – the long hours of travel and preparation, and then the longer hours of waiting. All for that one electric, pulse-revving vision when the universe suddenly declares itself.”

— Diane Ackerman

93. “What would dawn have been like, had you awakened? It would have sung through your bones. All I can do this morning is let it sing through mine.”

— Diane Ackerman

94. “Frantic and serene, vigilant and calm, wrung-out and fortified, explosive and sedate – love commands a vast army of moods. Hoping for victory, limping from the latest skirmish, lovers enter the arena once again. Sitting still, we are as daring as gladiators.”

— Diane Ackerman

95. “A kiss is like singing into someone’s mouth.”

— Diane Ackerman

96. “Couples are jigsaw puzzles that hang together by touching in just enough points.”

— Diane Ackerman

97. “It began in mystery, and it will end in mystery, but what a savage and beautiful country lies in between.”

— Diane Ackerman

98. “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.”

— Diane Ackerman

99. “Although Mengele’s subjects could be operated on without any painkillers at all, a remarkable example of Nazi zoophilia is that a leading biologist was once punished for not giving worms enough anesthesia during an experiment.”

— Diane Ackerman

100. “In the early years of the Uprising, we survived on one meal a day of horse meat and soup, but by the end we ate only dried peas, dogs, cats and birds.”

— Diane Ackerman