Diane Ackerman Quotes

The Dutch carried vanilla to Indonesia, and the British to India. “Tincture of vanilla” didn’t appear in the United States until the 1800s, but when it did, it appealed to the American impatience and aversion to fuss, that sprint through life whose byword is convenience. Europeans use the vanilla bean, luxuriating in its textures, tastes, and aromas, but we preferred it reduced and already bottled. By the nineteenth century, demand flourished, vanilla became synthesized, and the world floated on a mantle of cheap flavoring.

I plan my garden as I wish I could plan my life, with islands of surprise, color, and scent. A seductive aspect of gardening is how many rituals it requires.

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

Not everything we feel is felt powerfully enough to send a message to the brain; the rest of the sensations just wash over us, telling us nothing. Much is lost in translation, or is censored, and in any case our nerves don’t all fire at once. Some of them remain silent while others respond. This makes our version of the world somewhat simplistic, given how complex the world is. The body’s quest isn’t for truth, it’s for survival.

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

The color we see is always the one being reflected, the one that doesn’t stay put and get absorbed. We see the rejected color, and say “an apple is red.” But in truth an apple is everything but red.

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

In the Bible, God instructs Moses to burn incense sweet and to His liking. Does God have nostrils? How can a god prefer one smell of this earth to another? The rudiments of decay complete a cycle necessary for growth and deliverance. Carrion smells offensive to us, but delicious to those animals who rely on it for food. What they excrete will make the soil rich and the crops abundant. There is no need for divine election. Perception is itself a form of grace.

... extinction is happening very fast, because we've been destroying habitats — and polluting things. And there may come a time when we want to bring back animals, or we could use the just to the enrich the gene pool of animals that are very close to extinction.

Though it has a certain Russian-roulette quality to it, eating fugu is considered a highly aesthetic experience. That makes one wonder about the condition that we, in chauvinistic shorthand, referred to as “human.” Creatures who will one day vanish from the earth in the ultimate subtraction of sensuality that we call death, we spend our lives courting death, fomenting wars, watching sickening horror movies in which maniacs slash and torture their victims, hurrying our own deaths in fast cars, cigarette smoking, suicide. Death obsesses us, as well it might, but our response to it is so strange. Faced with tornadoes chewing up homes, with dust storms ruining crops, floods and earthquakes swallowing up whole cities, with ghostly diseases that gnaw at one’s bone marrow, cripple, or craze—rampant miseries that need no special bidding, but come freely, giving their horror like alms—you’d think human beings would hold out against the forces of Nature, combine their efforts and become allies, not create devastation of their own, not add to one another’s miseries. Death does such fine work without us. How strange that people, whole countries sometimes, wish to be its willing accomplices.

... you don't have to be larger than life to come to the aid of somebody in trouble. All you need to be able to be compassionate, put your own troubles on hold while someone else's are taking the forefront, and, maybe the toughest part, you have to be wholly nonjudgemental.

We may pretend that beauty is only skin deep, but Aristotle was right when he observed that "beauty is a far greater recommendation than any letter of introduction.” The sad truth is that attractive people do better in school, where they receive more help, better grades, and less punishment; at work, where they are rewarded with higher pay, more prestigious jobs, and faster promotions; in finding mates, where they tend to be in control of the relationships and make most of the decisions; and among total strangers, who assume them to be interesting, honest, virtuous, and successful. After all, in fairy tales, the first stories most of us hear, the heroes are handsome, the heroines are beautiful, and the wicked sots are ugly. Children learn implicitly that good people are beautiful and bad people are ugly, and society restates that message in many subtle ways as they grow older. So perhaps it’s not surprising that handsome cadets at West Point achieve a higher rank by the time they graduate, or that a judge is more likely to give an attractive criminal a shorter sentence.

Most of all, the twentieth century will be remembered as the time when we first began to understand what our address was. The “big, beautiful, blue, wet ball” of recent years is one way to say it. But a more profound way will speak of the orders of magnitude of that bigness, the shades of that blueness, the arbitrary delicacy of beauty itself, the ways in which water has made life possible, and the fragile euphoria of the complex ecosystem that is Earth, an Earth on which, from space, there are no visible fences, or military zones, or national borders.

When I set a glass prism on a windowsill and allow the sun to flood through it, a spectrum of colors dances on the floor. What we call "white" is a rainbow of colored rays packed into a small space. The prism sets them free. Love is the white light of emotion.

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.