Diane Ackerman Life Quotations

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.

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.

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.

Nothing reveals more about the inner life of a people than their arts ...

In our heart we know that life loves life. Yet we feast on some of the other life-forms with which we share our planet; we kill to live. Taste is what carries us across that rocky moral terrain, what makes the horror palatable, and the paradox we could not defend by reason melts into a jungle of sweet temptations.

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

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

The heart is a museum, filled with the exhibits of a lifetime's loves.

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

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.