Diane Ackerman Quotes

In real life we don't know what's going to happen next. So how can you be that way on a stage? Being alive to the possibility of not knowing exactly how everything is going to happen next - if you can find places to have that happen onstage, it can resonate with an experience of living.

It's a crazy game. It's a game we all choose to play.

To be existing at all is beautiful simply because of how complicated and unexplainable being alive really is.

If you're an outsider looking into my life, you're thinking, 'That dude is crazy. He's literally crazy.'

It's just a crazy damned life, that's all.

Life is a voyage, and we are all sailing under sealed orders. We plan, plot, scheme and arrange, and some fine day Fate steps in and our dreams are tossed into the yeasty deep. We grin and bear it--anyway we bear it: it is the only thing to do.

Life is but a dream, a grotesque and foolish dream.

Better a thousand times even a swiftly fading, ephemeral moment of life than the epoch-long unconsciousness of the stone.

I suppose life is a little like that, isn't it, a message in a bottle pitched out to sea, to be carried by the winds and the tides, washing up on the beaches we could never imagine.

I think i'm just breathing, that's all. And there's a difference between breathing and being alive.

Life does not play with marked cards.Winning or losing is part of it.

Changes before your eyes, things you can do and things you can't. My attitude is always let it keep rolling.

Duty never stopped anyone from following their dreams.

Knowing that you're crazy doesn't make the crazy things stop happening.

How soon will we accept this opportunity to be fully alive before we die? (88)

We're either awake or we're sleeping. During the time that we're awake, we work very hard at denying things, mainly because we have to function as people. We have to control and repress everything that we're fearful of, because it doesn't make sense to go crazy on the streets, but in reality we hide and we hide, repress and repress, our fears of the world of violence, of separation, of death, and sometimes hopes, and some things that are very joyful, reunions or all of those good things. It's only in dreams that we're really truthful with whatever hurts most; they're really very real.

Life is a series of surprises and would not be worth taking or keeping if it were not.

Time is so strange and life is twice as strange.

Life is funny, baby, and that's no joke

Life isn't nearly as stable as we want it to be.

She had just realized there were two things that prevent us from achieving our dreams: believing them to be impossible or seeing those dreams made possible by some sudden turn of the wheel of fortune, when you least expected it. For at that moment, all our fears suddenly surface: the fear of setting off along a road heading who knows where, the fear of a life full of new challenges, the fear of losing forever everything that is familiar.

This life we live is a strange dream, and I don't believe at all any account men give of it.

Is there anybody alive out there?

You can never know how your clock runs. But it does run - and always faster than you think.

I do not know how to distinguish between waking life and a dream. Are we not always living the life that we imagine we are?