My function as a writer is to provide an atmosphere in which people can think wisely about what we’re doing on this planet.
BARRY LOPEZFor so many centuries, the exchange of gifts has held us together. It has made it possible to bridge the abyss where language struggles.
More Barry Lopez Quotes
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The wolf exerts a powerful influence on the human imagination. It takes your stare and turns it back on you
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Would the last animal, eating garbage and living on the last scrap of land, his mate dead, would he still forgive you?
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When I sit at that typewriter, I have to be frightened of what I’m trying to do. I’m frightened by my own belief that I can actually get a story down on paper.
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The land is like poetry: it is inexplicably coherent, it is transcendent in its meaning, and it has the power to elevate a consideration of human life.
BARRY LOPEZ -
For so many centuries, the exchange of gifts has held us together. It has made it possible to bridge the abyss where language struggles.
BARRY LOPEZ -
Throughout the centuries we have projected on to the wolf the qualities we most despise and fear in ourselves.
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I lay there knowing something eerie ties us to the world of animals. Sometimes the animals pull you backward into it. You share hunger and fear with them like salt in blood.
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The attempt to close the gap between what is known and what IS, is the temptation behind the apple in Genesis.
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The writer works on the inside and the critic works on the outside. I don’t know what it looks like on the outside, sometimes. It’s not that I’m not interested-it’s not where I live. I live inside the story.
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If there is a stage at which an individual life becomes truly adult, it must be when one grasps the irony in its unfolding and accepts responsibility for a life lived in the midst of such paradox.
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It does not demean men to want to be what they imagine the wolf to be, but it does demean them to kill the animal for it.
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If stories come to you, care for them. And learn to give them away where they are needed. Sometimes a person needs a story more than food to stay alive.
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real beauty is so deep you have to move into darkness to understand it.
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You continue to live them out, making your life a worthy expression of leaning into the light.
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One of the great dreams of man must be to find some place between the extremes of nature and civilization where it is possible to live without regret.
BARRY LOPEZ