A Quote by Diane Ackerman

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.
I was always fascinated with animals and I wanted to go to the zoo all the time. When I got older and I realized the animals bite, and when they do, most of the time you don't survive it kind of crushed my dream and now I just want to WATCH Discovery Channel.
In a way, human beings have never been part of the natural order; we're not biological in the normal sense. Normal biological animals stop eating when they're not hungry and stop breeding when there is no sense in breeding. By contrast, human beings are what I think of as "biomythic" animals: we're controlled largely by the stories we tell. When we get the story wrong, we get out of harmony with the rest of the natural order. For a long time, our unnatural beahvior didn't threaten the natural world, but now it does.
For at the same time many people seem eager to extend the circle of our moral consideration to animals, in our factory farms and laboratories we are inflicting more suffering on more animals than at any time in history.
A plague on eminence! I hardly dare cross the street any more without a convoy, and I am stared at wherever I go like an idiot member of a royal family or an animal in a zoo; and zoo animals have been known to die from stares.
The purpose of seasonal festivals is periodically to revive the topocosm. Gaster coined this word from the Greek - topo for place and cosmos for world order. Topocosm means "the world order of a particular place." The topocosm is the entire complex of any given locality conceived as a living organism, not just the human community but the total community - the plants, animals and soils of the place. The topocosm is not only the actual and present living community but also that continuous entity of which the present community is but the current manifestation.
Science, literature, and common sense tell us that the self is a fickle thing, subject to revision in real time, and that the chasm that exists between any two people exists inside each and every one of us.
We shall never meet, but there is something I want you to know. My time is not the same as your time. Our times are not the same. And do you know what that means? That means that time does not exist. Do you want me to repeat that? There is no time. There is a life and a death. There are people and animals. Our thoughts exist. And the world. The universe, too. But there is no time. You might as well take it easy. Do you feel better now? I feel better. This is going to work out. Have a nice day.
Sometimes I like to watch TV, though I never get to watch any of the shows in real time. I'm a fan of 'Downton Abbey,' 'Boardwalk Empire,' and 'Boss.' There's a British series called 'Luther,' but in England, they think a series means four episodes. And I like 'Mad Men.' Otherwise, it's always good to unwind with a book.
A candle is a living, flickering light. It can easily be blown out. As we watch a candle burn we see the wax diminish. It melts away - a symbol for life. [...] Candles have long been central to worship. By lighting them we announce that we are entering into a different sense of time. Not the usual ticktock time of daily living, but sacred time, a timeless time.
From the moment we are born, people tell us that the world is like this and like that, this way, that way. It is natural that - for a certain period of time - we end up believing what we are told. But we must soon push these ideas aside and discover our own way of living reality.
But in this case people have hundreds and hundreds of animals, they have a menagerie. You can't possibly love that many animals. So, it's more about the ego and the pride of having all of these things sort of like a car collection or a gun collection.
She stays lost in the middle of her own world somewhere. We can’t get in and she doesn’t come out. Not often anyway, and certainly not for any length of time. But her mind takes her to somewhere kind, I think, to judge by the peaceful, serene look on her face most of the time.
I believe that the best way to create good living conditions for any animal, whether it's a captive animal living in a zoo, a farm animal or a pet, is to base animal welfare programs on the core emotion systems in the brain. My theory is that the environment animals live in should activate their positive emotions as much as possible, and not activate their negative emotions any more than necessary. If we get the animal's emotions rights, we will have fewer problem behaviors... All animals and people have the same core emotion systems in the brain.
We also have to work, though, sort of the dark side, if you will. We've got to spend time in the shadows in the intelligence world. A lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussion, using sources and methods that are available to our intelligence agencies... That's the world these folks operate in, and so it's going to be vital for us to use any means at our disposal, basically, to achieve our objective.
It is as though the space between us were time: an irrevocable quality. It is as though time, no longer running straight before us in a diminishing line, now runs parallel between us like a looping string, the distance being the doubling accretion of the thread an not the interval between.
Any nation that expects to be ignorant and free," Jefferson said, "expects what never was and never will be." And if the gap between the educated and the uneducated in America continues to grow as it is in our time, as fast as or faster than the gap between the rich and the poor, the gap between the educated and the uneducated is going to be of greater consequence and the more serious threat to our way of life. We must not, by any means, misunderstand that.
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