Deep Play Quotes

“On the other hand, one can turn bronco riding into drudgery. One can create mildly. One can live at a low flame. Most people do. We’re afraid to look foolish, or feel too extravagantly, or make a mistake, or risk unnecessary pain. One fears intensity. But, given something like death, what does it matter if one looks foolish now and then, or tried too hard, or cares too deeply? A shallow life creates a world as flat as a shadow. In that half-light, the sun never burns, risks recede, safety becomes habit, and individuals have little to teach one another.”
― Diane Ackerman, Deep Play

“Deep play arises in such moments of intense enjoyment, focus, control, creativity, timelessness, confidence, volition, lack of self-awareness (hence transcendence) while doing things intrinsically worthwhile, rewarding for their own sake…It feels cleansing because when acting and thinking becomes one, there is no room left for other thoughts.”
― Diane Ackerman, Deep Play

“I suppose I try to be a translator of sorts, striving to translate emotion and vision into words, to express the life force of animals and landscapes, to give them voice. I pore over the lustrous details of nature and human nature. How different is this from a monk devoting his life to an illuminated manuscript?”
― Diane Ackerman, Deep Play

“For those future residents of Earth: may their world still be packed with mysteries. May they still grow giddy on the eve of a great adventure. May they become more responsible to one another and the planet. May they keep their taste for the renegade. May they never lose their sense of innocence and wonder. May they live to chase brash and astonishing dreams. May they return to tell me, if such a thing is possible, so that I can know the answer to a thousand scrupulous puzzles, hear of whole civilizations that bloomed and vanished, learn what travel to other solar systems has revealed, and behold the marvels that arose while I was gone. If that’s not possible, then I will have to make do with the playgrounds of mortality, and hope that at the end of my life I can say, simply, wholeheartedly, that is was grace enough to be born and live.”
― Diane Ackerman, Deep Play

“We ask the poet to reassure us by giving us a geometry of living, in which all things add up and cohere, to tell us how things buttress once another, circle round and intermelt.”
― Diane Ackerman, Deep Play

“Consciousness is the great poem of matter, whose opposite extreme is a Grand Canyon. In between, matter has odd fits and whims: lymph, feathers, brass. Cactus strikes me as a very odd predicament for matter to get into. But perhaps it is no stranger than a comb of an iris, or the way flowers present their sex organs to the world. There is something about the poignant senselessness of all that rock that reminds us, as nothing else could so dramatically, what a bit of luck we are, what a natural wonder.”
― Diane Ackerman, Deep Play

“Poetry is a kind of knowing, a way of looking at the ordinary until it becomes special and the exceptional until it becomes commonplace.”
― Diane Ackerman, Deep Play

“There are also natural wonders, sacred because they magnetize people, wrench from them profound feelings of awe and fright. What is sacred goes far beyond the religious.”
― Diane Ackerman, Deep Play