Diane Ackerman Quotes (30 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

Sometimes attributed to Ackerman this actually originates with Nicolas Chamfort, as quoted in The Cynic's Breviary : Maxims and Anecdotes from Nicolas de Chamfort (1902) as translated by William G. Hutchison, p. 37
Misattributed

“Look in the mirror. The face that pins you with its double gaze reveals a chastening secret. You are looking into a predator's eyes. Most predators have eyes set right on the front of their heads, so they can use binocular vision to sight and track their prey.”

Diane Ackerman book A Natural History of the Senses

Source: A Natural History of the Senses (1991), p. 229

“We think of it as a sort of traffic accident of the heart. It is an emotion that scares us more than cruelty, more than violence, more than hatred. We allow ourselves to be foiled by the vagueness of the word. After all, love requires the utmost vulnerability. We equip someone with freshly sharpened knives; strip naked; then invite him to stand close. What could be scarier?”

Diane Ackerman

A Natural History of Love (1994)

“When art separates this thick tangle of feelings, love bares its bones.”

Diane Ackerman

A Natural History of Love (1994)

“Out-of-body experiences aim to shed the senses, but they cannot. One may see from a new perspective, but it’s still an experience of vision.”

Diane Ackerman book A Natural History of the Senses

Postscript (p. 301)
A Natural History of the Senses (1990)

“My muse is male, has the silvery complexion of the moon, and never speaks to me directly.”

Diane Ackerman book A Natural History of the Senses

Source: A Natural History of the Senses (1990), Chapter 6 “Synesthesia” (p. 299)

“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.””

Diane Ackerman book A Natural History of the Senses

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.
Source: A Natural History of the Senses (1990), Chapter 5 “Vision” (pp. 271-272)

“That evening, as I watched the sunset’s pinwheels of apricot and mauve slowly explode into red ribbons, I thought: The sensory misers will inherit the earth, but first they will make it not worth living on.”

Diane Ackerman book A Natural History of the Senses

Source: A Natural History of the Senses (1990), Chapter 5 “Vision” (p. 256)

“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.””

Diane Ackerman book A Natural History of the Senses

But in truth an apple is everything but red.
Source: A Natural History of the Senses (1990), Chapter 5 “Vision” (p. 252)

“We hallucinate sounds more often than sights. There are auditory mirages, which vanish without trace; auditory illusions that turn out to be something other than they seemed; and, of course, voices that speak to saints, seers, and psychotics, telling them how to act and what to believe.”

Diane Ackerman book A Natural History of the Senses

Source: A Natural History of the Senses (1990), Chapter 4 “Hearing” (p. 180)

“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.””

Diane Ackerman book A Natural History of the Senses

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.
Source: A Natural History of the Senses (1990), Chapter 3 “Taste” (p. 170)

“But, as sages have long said, the sexiest part of the body and the best aphrodisiac in the world is the imagination.”

Diane Ackerman book A Natural History of the Senses

Source: A Natural History of the Senses (1990), Chapter 3 “Taste” (p. 131)

“Consciousness, the great poem of matter, seems so unlikely, so impossible, and yet here we are with our loneliness and our giant dreams.”

Diane Ackerman book A Natural History of the Senses

Source: A Natural History of the Senses (1990), Chapter 3 “Taste” (p. 130)

“What I’m really wondering is why notices were posted and invitations sent out at all: If it’s a psychics’ convention, shouldn’t everyone just know where and when to meet?”

Diane Ackerman book A Natural History of the Senses

Source: A Natural History of the Senses (1990), Chapter 2 “Touch” (p. 115)

“Suicidal people have tunnel vision - no other choice seems possible. A counselor’s job is to put windows and doors in that tunnel.”

Diane Ackerman