56 Inspiring Diane Ackerman Quotes

I don't want to get to the end of my life and find that I have just lived the length of it. I want to have lived the width of it as well.

Wonder is the heaviest element on the periodic table. Even a tiny fleck of it stops time.

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

Words are small shapes in the gorgeous chaos of the world.

Who would deduce the dragonfly from the larva, the iris from the bud, the lawyer from the infant? ...We are all shape-shifters and magical reinventors. Life is really a plural noun, a caravan of selves.

I don’t want to be a passenger in my own life.

Libraries change lives. They are the soul of a people.

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

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.

I watched her face switch among the radio stations of memory

Love seems to be as Essential as Sunlight

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?

And yet, words are the passkeys to our souls. Without them, we can't really share the enormity of our lives.

To begin to understand the gorgeous fever that is consciousness, we must try to understand the senses and what they can tell us about the ravishing world we have the privilege to inhabit.

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

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?

Love is like a batik created from many emotional colors, it is a fabric whose pattern and brightness may vary.

We can't enchant the world, which makes its own magic; but we can enchant ourselves by paying deep attention

I don't want to get to the end of my life and find that I just lived the lenght of it. I want to have lived the width of it as well.

Fear is danger to your body, but disgust is danger to your soul.

How can love's spaciousness be conveyed in the narrow confines of one syllable?

The daftest logic brings such sweet unrest.
![Couples are jigsaw puzzles that hang together by touching in just enough points. They're never total fits or misfits. ... We marry children who have grown up and still rejoice in being children .... [p. 15]](https://www.wisdomly.net/images/quotes/diane-ackerman-14834.jpg)
Couples are jigsaw puzzles that hang together by touching in just enough points. They're never total fits or misfits. ... We marry children who have grown up and still rejoice in being children .... [p. 15]

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

Below us somewhere in the gelatinous phantasmagoria of churning blue, the whales wouldn't be much aware of the storm.

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

No matter how politely one says it, we owe our existence to the farts of blue-green algae.

Insight roams the sea of the unconscious like the Loch Ness monster, a rumor whose wake occasionally becomes visible, but even then it's mystifying and scarcely believed.

Our lives together, our duet, also continues to evolve, and even if we can’t go back to how it was, we’re designing a good life for us, in spite of everything.

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.