Diane Ackerman
Because IQ tests favor memory skills and logic, overlooking artistic creativity, insight, resiliency, emotional reserves, sensory gifts, and life experience, they can't really predict success, let alone satisfaction.Collection: Memories
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?Collection: Memories
Flying has changed how we imagine our planet, which we have seen whole from space, so that even the farthest nations are ecological neighbors. It has changed our ideas about time. When you can gird the earth at 1,000 m.p.h., how can you endure the tardiness of a plumber? Most of all, flying has changed our sense of our body, the personal space in which we live, now elastic and swift. I could be in Bombay for afternoon tea if I wished. My body isn't limited by its own weaknesses; it can rush through space.Collection: Ideas
Writer's block is a luxury most people with deadlines don't have.Collection: Block
Couples are jigsaw puzzles that hang together by touching in just enough points.Collection: Couple
Fear is danger to your body, but disgust is danger to your soul.Collection: Soul
After all, coffee is bitter, a flavor from the forbidden and dangerous realm.Collection: Coffee
The idea of safety had shrunk into particles - one snug moment, then the next. Meanwhile, the brain piped fugues of worry and staged mind-theaters full of tragedies and triumphs, because unfortunately, the fear of death does wonders to focus the mind, inspire creativity, and heightens the senses. Trusting one's hunches only seems gamble if one has time for seem; otherwise the brain goes on autopilot and trades the elite craft of analysis for the best rapid insights that float up from its danger files and ancient bag of tricks.Collection: Creativity
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.Collection: Mistake
We humans are obsessed with lights...Perhaps it is our way of hurling the constellations back at the sky.Collection: Light
Love, like truth, is the unassailable defense.Collection: Love
Writing is my form of celebration and prayer.Collection: Prayer
Nature is also great fun. To pretend that nature isn't fun is to miss much of the joy of being alive.Collection: Nature
Give a man enough rope and he'll wrap himself around your little finger.Collection: Men
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.Collection: Trying
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.Collection: Dog
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.Collection: Love Is
I think if you look at any facet of nature in enough detail, you find it fascinating. How could you not? The universe is so full of marvels. Here's an example -- rain, the shape of rain. I was minding my own business, working on my book, looking out the window, and it was raining and I was noticing that the raindrops were falling in that classic round-looking way, and I thought, 'I wonder if raindrops really are round?' So I started researching it a little, and I discovered that raindrops change shape 300 times a second.Collection: Rain
When I go biking, I repeat a mantra of the day's sensations: bright sun, blue sky, warm breeze, blue jay's call, ice melting and so on. This helps me transcend the traffic, ignore the clamorings of work, leave all the mind theaters behind and focus on nature instead. I still must abide by the rules of the road, of biking, of gravity. But I am mentally far away from civilization. The world is breaking someone else's heart.Collection: Heart
A flower's fragrance declares to all the world that it is fertile, available, and desirable, its sex organs oozing with nectar. Its smell reminds us in vestigial ways of fertility, vigor, life-force, all the optimism, expectancy, and passionate bloom of youth. We inhale its ardent aroma and, no matter what our ages, we feel young and nubile in a world aflame with desire.Collection: Sex
Above all, we ask the poet to teach us a way of seeing.Collection: Way
Hit a tripwire of smell and memories explode all at once. A complex vision leaps out of the undergrowth.Collection: Memories
No matter how politely one says it, we owe our existence to the farts of blue-green algae.Collection: Blue
We would lie on coral sand, below sugary stars, watching Cassiopeia mount her throne and the Great Bear wash its paws in the South. I would say, "I have a secret to tell you." And, folding me in your arms, boyish and sly, you would answer: "Whisper it into my mouth.Collection: Stars
We evolved as creatures knitted into the fabric of nature, and without its intimate truths, we can find ourselves unraveling.Collection: Fabric
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.Collection: Spiritual
Nature neither gives nor expects mercy.Collection: Nature
A kiss is like singing into someone's mouth.Collection: Best Love
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.Collection: Mother
Our skin is what stands between us and the world.Collection: Skins
One of the keystones of romantic love - and also of the ecstatic religion practiced by mystics - is the powerful desire to become one with the beloved.Collection: Powerful
For the longest time I didn't realize I was creative - I just thought I was strange.Collection: Creativity
Poetry reminds us of the truths about life and human nature that we knew all along, but forgot somehow because they weren't yet in memorable language.Collection: Memorable
Words are small shapes in the gorgeous chaos of the world.Collection: World
Knee-deep in the cosmic overwhelm, I’m stricken by the ricochet wonder of it all: the plain everythingness of everything, in cahoots with the everythingness of everything else.Collection: Knees
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.Collection: Fall
As anyone who has received or dispensed psychotherapy knows, it's a profession whose mainspring is love. Nearly everyone who visits a therapist has a love disorder of one sort or another, and each has a story to tell - of love lost or denied, love twisted or betrayed, love perverted or shackled to violence. Broken attachments litter the office floors like pick-up sticks. People appear with frayed seams and spilling pockets.Collection: Lost Love
Happiness doesn't require laughter, only well-being and a sense that the world is breaking someone else's heart, not mine.Collection: Happiness
The brain is only three pounds of blood, dream, and electricity, and yet from that mortal stew come Beethoven's sonatas. Dizzie Gillespie's jazz. Audrey Hepburn's wish to spend the last month of her life in Somalia, saving children.Collection: Dream
What is erotic? The acrobatic play of the imagination. The sea of memories in which we bathe. The way we caress and worship things with our eyes. Our willingness to be stirred by the sight of the voluptuous. What is erotic is our passion for the liveliness of life.Collection: Memories
I am a great fan of the universe, which I take literally: as one. All of it interests me, and it interests me in detail.Collection: Fans
Libraries change lives. They are the soul of a people.Collection: Life Changing
Smell brings to mind... a family dinner of pot roast and sweet potatoes during a myrtle-mad August in a Midwestern town. Smells detonate softly in our memory like poignant land mines hidden under the weedy mass of years.Collection: Senior
In the absence of touching and being touched, people of all ages can sicken and grow touched starved. Touch seems to be as essential as sunlight.Collection: People
Tranquillity hides in small spaces, and when found needs to be treasured, because you know it's a phantom that will slip away again.Collection: Space
When you consider something like death, after which (there being no news flash to the contrary) we may well go out like a candle flame, then it probably doesn't matter if we try too hard, are awkward sometimes, care for one another too deeply, are excessively curious about nature, are too open to experience, enjoy a nonstop expense of the senses in an effort to know life intimately and lovingly.Collection: Flames
Smell is the mute sense, the one without words.Collection: Smell
An animal on a leash is not tamed by the owner. The owner is extending himself through the leash to that part of his personality which is pure dog, that part of him which just wants to eat, sleep, bark, hump chairs, wet the floor in joy, and drink out of a toilet bowl.Collection: Dog
In Manhattan last month I heard a woman borrowing the jargon of junkies to say to another, 'Want to do some chocolate?'Collection: Chocolate