Life & Wisdom Quote by Diane Ackerman

A passenger gets carried. Diane Ackerman’s line bristles against that quiet surrender, the way a life can slip into autopilot while you’re technically still aboard. The phrasing is deceptively plain, but the metaphor lands because it’s bodily: you can feel the cramped seat, the window you didn’t choose, the route someone else decided. “My own life” is the sting. She’s not rejecting responsibility in the abstract; she’s refusing the indignity of being sidelined inside the one story that’s supposed to be hers.

As a poet, Ackerman’s intent isn’t to lay out a self-help blueprint so much as to re-sensitize the reader to agency. The subtext is that modern living makes passengers of us by default: careers that calcify into roles, relationships that drift into scripts, routines that feel like safety until they start feeling like sedation. “Don’t want” matters, too. It’s an admission of temptation. Being a passenger is easy; it’s also socially rewarded. People love a compliant traveler.

Contextually, the quote sits comfortably in Ackerman’s larger project: attention as an ethical act. Her work often treats noticing as a kind of participation in the world, and participation is what passengers forfeit. The line works because it’s not grandiose; it’s procedural. It’s about choosing, steering, and sometimes braking. Underneath it is a bracing claim: a life you don’t actively author won’t remain neutral. Someone else - habit, fear, institutions, even love - will take the wheel.