There’s so much to be afraid of.
BARRY LOPEZThe land gets inside of us; and we must decide one way or another what this means, what we will do about it.
More Barry Lopez Quotes
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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.
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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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Everything is held together with stories. That is all that is holding us together, stories and compassion.
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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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We simply do not understand our place in the universe and have not the courage to admit it.
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Throughout the centuries we have projected on to the wolf the qualities we most despise and fear in ourselves.
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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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The opposite of love is not hate; it’s indifference. To be indifferent is to not express love.
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real beauty is so deep you have to move into darkness to understand it.
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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.
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The gaze of the wolf reached into our soul.
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There are simply no answers to some of the great pressing questions.
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The land urges us to come around to an understanding of 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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I know of no restorative of heart, body, and soul more effective against hopelessness than the restoration of the Earth.
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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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In behaving respectfully toward all that the land contains, it is possible to imagine a stifling ignorance falling away from us.
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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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You can’t learn anything from saguaro cactus, from ocotillo. They are just passing through; their roots, their much heralded dormancy in the dry season, these are only illusions of permanence. They know even less than you do.
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Have we come all this way, I wondered, only to be dismantled by our own technologies, to be betrayed by political connivance or the impersonal avarice of a corporation?
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My function as a writer is to provide an atmosphere in which people can think wisely about what we’re doing on this planet.
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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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It is the imagination that gives shape to the universe.
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One must live in the middle of contradiction, because if all contradiction were eliminated at once life would collapse.
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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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You continue to live them out, making your life a worthy expression of leaning into the light.
BARRY LOPEZ