Diane Ackerman Quotes (16 Quotes)

Nothing is more memorable than a smell. One scent can be unexpected, momentary and fleeting, yet conjure up a childhood summer beside a lake in the mountains.

Success produces success, just as money produces money.

There is no way in which to understand the world without first detecting it through the radar-net of our senses.

Touch seems to be as essential as sunlight.

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, lifeforce, 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.

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

A poem records emotions and moods that lie beyond normal language, that can only be patched together and hinted at metaphorically.

Look in the mirror. The face that pins you with its double gaze reveals a chastening secret.

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.

Look into the mirror. The face that pins you with its double gaze reveals a chastening secret You are looking into a predator's eyes.

We live on the leash of our senses.

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

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

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

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

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.