Diane Ackerman
We live on the leash of our senses.
There is no way in which to understand the world without first detecting it through the radar-net of our senses.
Success produces success, just as money produces money.
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.
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.
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.
Hit a tripwire of smell and memories explode all at once. A complex vision leaps out of the undergrowth.
Everyone admits that love is wonderful and necessary, yet no one agrees on just what it is.
A poem records emotions and moods that lie beyond normal language, that can only be patched together and hinted at metaphorically.