Diane Ackerman

And yet, words are the passkeys to our souls. Without them, we can't really share the enormity of our lives.

For better or worse, zoos are how most people come to know big or exotic animals. Few will ever see wild penguins sledding downhill to sea on their bellies, giant pandas holding bamboo lollipops in China or tree porcupines in the Canadian Rockies, balled up like giant pine cones.

We evolved as creatures knitted into the fabric of nature, and without its intimate truths, we can find ourselves unraveling.

Even without seeing the crickets, grasshoppers, cicadas and katydids, we hear them shrilling in this season and trust that they're the tiny living gargoyles entomologists claim.

Shaped a little like a loaf of French country bread, our brain is a crowded chemistry lab, bustling with nonstop neural conversations.Imagine the brain, that shiny mound of being, that mouse-gray parliament of cells, that dream factory, that petit tyrant inside a ball of bone, that huddle of neurons calling all the plays, that little everywhere, that fickle pleasuredome, that wrinkled wardrobe of selves stuffed into the skull like too many clothes into a gym bag.

Love is the most important thing in our lives, a passion for which we would fight or die, and yet we're reluctant to linger over its names. Without a supple vocabulary, we can't even talk or think about it directly.

Devising a vocabulary for gardening is like devising a vocabulary for sex. There are the correct Latin names, but most people invent euphemisms. Those who refer to plants by Latin name are considered more expert, if a little pedantic.

We humans are obsessed with lights...Perhaps it is our way of hurling the constellations back at the sky.

Couples are jigsaw puzzles that hang together by touching in just enough points. They're never total fits or misfits. In time, a pair invents its own commonwealth, complete with anthems, rituals, and lingos-a cult of two with fallible gods.

Look at your feet. You are standing in the sky. When we think of the sky, we tend to look up, but the sky actually begins at the earth.

Though not a natural world by any means, more like a collection of living dioramas, a zoo exists in its own time zone, somewhere between the seasonal sense of animals and our madly ticking watch time.

When all is said and done, we exist only in relation to the world, and our senses evolved as scouts who bridge that divide and provide volumes of information, warnings and rewards.

Brain scans show synchrony between the brains of mother and child; but what they can't show is the internal bond that belongs to neither alone, a fusion in which the self feels so permeable it doesn't matter whose body is whose.

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.

A self is a frightening thing to waste, it's the lens through which one's whole life is viewed, and few people are willing to part with it, in death, or even imaginatively, in art.

I swear I will not dishonor my soul with hatred, but offer myself humbly as a guardian of nature, as a healer of misery, as a messenger of wonder, as an architect of peace.

Which is crueler, an old man's lost memories of a life lived, or a young man's lost memories of the life he meant to live?

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.

Symbolic of life, hair bolts from our head[s]. Like the earth, it can be harvested, but it will rise again. We can change its color and texture when the mood strikes us, but in time it will return to its original form, just as Nature will in time turn our precisely laid-out cities into a weed-way.

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

Nature is more like a seesaw than a crystal, a never-ending conga line of bold moves and corrections.