{"author":"Diane Ackerman","author_id":"Diane+Ackerman","total_quotes":49,"quotes":[{"text":"Metaphor isn't just decorative language. If it were, it wouldn't scare us so much. . . . Colorful language threatens some people, who associate it, I think, with a kind of eroticism (playing with language in public = playing with yourself), and with extra expense (having to sense or feel more). I don't share that opinion. Why reduce life to a monotone? Is that truer to the experience of being alive? I don't think so. It robs us of life's many textures. Language provides an abundance of words to keep us company on our travels. But we're losing words at a reckless pace, the national vocabulary is shrinking. Most Americans use only several hundred words or so. Frugality has its place, but not in the larder of language. We rely on words to help us detail how we feel, what we once felt, what we can feel. When the blood drains out of language, one's experience of life weakens and grows pale. It's not simply a dumbing down, but a numbing.","author":"Diane Ackerman","tags":["language","metaphor","vocabulary"],"id":1649,"author_id":"Diane+Ackerman"},{"text":"Who would deduce the dragonfly from the larva, the iris from the bud, the lawyer from the infant? ...We are all shape-shifters and magical reinventors. Life is really a plural noun, a caravan of selves.","author":"Diane Ackerman","tags":["inspirational","nature"],"id":20618,"author_id":"Diane+Ackerman"},{"text":"I don't want to be a passenger in my own life.","author":"Diane Ackerman","tags":["self","reliance"],"id":20913,"author_id":"Diane+Ackerman"},{"text":"Artificial intelligence is growing up fast, as are robots whose facial expressions can elicit empathy and make your mirror neurons quiver.","author":"Diane Ackerman","tags":["empathy","mirror","growing up "],"id":24974,"author_id":"Diane+Ackerman"},{"text":"As fleeting emotions stalk it, a face can leak fear or the guilt of a forming lie.","author":"Diane Ackerman","tags":["emotions"],"id":32547,"author_id":"Diane+Ackerman"},{"text":"The sensory misers will inherit the earth, but first they will make it not worth living on. When you consider something like death, after which we may well go out like a candle flame, then it probably won’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.","author":"Diane Ackerman","tags":["curiosity","love","lust-for-life","senses"],"id":39926,"author_id":"Diane+Ackerman"},{"text":"Frantic and serene, vigilant and calm, wrung-out and fortified, explosive and sedate—love commands a vast army of moods. Hoping for victory, limping from the latest skirmish, lovers enter the arena once again. Sitting still, we are as daring as gladiators.","author":"Diane Ackerman","tags":["heartbreak","hope","love"],"id":72603,"author_id":"Diane+Ackerman"},{"text":"Couples are jigsaw puzzles that hang together by touching in just enough points. They're never total fits or misfits. ... We marry children who have grown up and still rejoice in being children .... [p. 15].","author":"Diane Ackerman","tags":["marriage"],"id":93387,"author_id":"Diane+Ackerman"},{"text":"The faint pink coating the treetops promised rippling buds, a sure sign of spring hastening in, right on schedule, and the animal world getting ready for its fiesta of courting and mating, dueling and dancing, suckling and grubbing, costume-making and shedding-in short, the fuzzy, fizzy hoopla of life's ramshackle return.","author":"Diane Ackerman","tags":["animals","life"],"id":103961,"author_id":"Diane+Ackerman"},{"text":"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.","author":"Diane Ackerman","tags":["172","eating","food","taste"],"id":107766,"author_id":"Diane+Ackerman"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":49,"pages":5,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}