So often loneliness comes from being out of touch with parts of oneself. We go searching for those parts in other people, but there's a difference between feeling separate from others and separate from oneself.
Diane AckermanWe evolved as creatures knitted into the fabric of nature, and without its intimate truths, we can find ourselves unraveling.
Diane AckermanThe knowing, I told myself, is only a vapor of the mind, and yet it can wreck havok with one's sanity.
Diane AckermanEcstasy is what everyone craves - not love or sex, but a hot-blooded, soaring intensity, in which being alive is a joy and a thrill. That enravishment doesn't give meaning to life, and yet without it life seems meaningless.
Diane AckermanA 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.
Diane Ackerman