Top 160 Diane Ackerman Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “If we mammals don’t get something to eat every day or two, our temperature drops, all our signs fall off, and we begin to starve. Living at biological red alert, it’s not surprising how obsessed we are with food; I’m just amazed we don’t pace and fret about it all the time.”

— Diane Ackerman

152. “Disassociating, mindfulness, transcendence-whatever the label-it’s a sort of loophole in our contract with reality, a form of self-rescue.”

— Diane Ackerman

153. “It’s essential to tailor rehab to what impassions someone. The brain gradually learns by riveting its attention-through endless repetitions.”

— Diane Ackerman

154. “Adult bats don’t weigh much. They’re mainly fur and appetite.”

— Diane Ackerman

155. “Nature rarely wastes a winning strategy.”

— Diane Ackerman

156. “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.”

— Diane Ackerman

157. “Nature neither gives nor expects mercy.”

— Diane Ackerman

158. “If any creature is in danger, you save it, human or animal.”

— Diane Ackerman

159. “Life is a thing that mutates without warning, not always in enviable ways. All part of the improbable adventure of being alive, of being a brainy biped with giant dreams on a crazy blue planet.”

— Diane Ackerman

160. “I suppose I try to be a translator of sorts, striving to translate emotion and vision into words, to express the life force of animals and landscapes, to give them voice. I pore over the lustrous details of nature and human nature. How different is this from a monk devoting his life to an illuminated manuscript?”

— Diane Ackerman

161. “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.”

— Diane Ackerman

162. “We have vexed and bothered every plant and every animal on every continent.”

— Diane Ackerman

163. “Humans are the most successful invasives of all time.”

— Diane Ackerman

164. “Each photograph is a magic lamp rubbed by the mind.”

— Diane Ackerman

165. “The faint pink coating the treetops promised rippling buds, a sure sign of spring hastening in, right on schedule, and the animal world getting ready for its fiesta of courting and mating, dueling and dancing, suckling and grubbing, costume-making and shedding-in short, the fuzzy, fizzy hoopla of life’s ramshackle return.”

— Diane Ackerman

166. “Heschel wrote of his childhood in Warsaw, “there was one thing we did not have to look for and that was exaltation. Every moment is great, we were taught, every moment is unique.”

— Diane Ackerman

167. “What sort of stewards of the future planet will today’s digital children be?”

— Diane Ackerman

168. “There’s no place you can go on the prairie that you don’t hear the white noise of the wind, steady and rough as surf curling along a non-existant shore.”

— Diane Ackerman

169. “In September 2013, the panel of 209 lead authors and 600 contributing authors, from 39 nations, poring over 9,200 scientific publications, came to these landmark conclusions: global warming is “unequivocal,” sea levels are rising, ice packs are melting, and if we continue at this pace we “will cause further warming and changes in all components of the climate.” However, they added, we can slow the process down if we begin at once.”

— Diane Ackerman

170. “I have one talent,” he wrote, “and that is the capacity to be tremendously surprised, surprised at life, at ideas.”

— Diane Ackerman

171. “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.”

— Diane Ackerman

172. “Meanwhile, the war storm blew violently, scaring all, and “casting a shadow on the lives of our Guests, who fled from the entrance of crematoriums and the thresholds of gas chambers,” needing more than refuge. “They desperately needed hope that a safe haven even existed, that the war’s horrors would one day end,” while they drifted along in the strange villa even its owners referred to as an ark.”

— Diane Ackerman

173. “Our mistakes are legion, but our talent is immeasurable.”

— Diane Ackerman

174. “I’m sure civilizations will still evolve through play, or rather as play, since that seems to be a fundamental mechanism of our humanity.”

— Diane Ackerman

175. “We tend to think of heroes only in terms of violent combat, whether it’s against enemies or a natural disaster. But human beings also perform radical acts of compassion; we just don’t talk about them, or we don’t talk about them as much.”

— Diane Ackerman

176. “Flight is nothing but an attitude in motion.”

— Diane Ackerman

177. “Thank you, Merciful Lord, for having arranged to provide flowers with fragrance, glow worms with their glow, and to make the stars in the sky sparkle.”

— Diane Ackerman

178. “We ogle plants and animals up close on television, the Internet and in the movies. We may not worship the animals we see, but we still regard them as necessary physical and spiritual companions. Technological nature can’t completely satisfy that yearning.”

— Diane Ackerman

179. “Alligators have beautiful undulating skin, which feels dense, spongy, solid, like the best eraser.”

— Diane Ackerman