The most intelligent thing we can do is love, not reason.
BARRY LOPEZThere’s so much to be afraid of.
More Barry Lopez Quotes
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We cannot, of course, save the World because we do not have authority over its parts. We can serve the world though. That is everyone’s calling, to lead a life that helps.
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real beauty is so deep you have to move into darkness to understand it.
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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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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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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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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 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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There are simply no answers to some of the great pressing questions.
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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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It is the imagination that gives shape to the universe.
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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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The interior landscape responds to the character and subtlety of the exterior landscape; the shape of the individual mind is affected by the land as it is by genes.
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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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I know of no restorative of heart, body, and soul more effective against hopelessness than the restoration of the Earth.
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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 gaze of the wolf reached into our soul.
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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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For so many centuries, the exchange of gifts has held us together. It has made it possible to bridge the abyss where language struggles.
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Sometimes a person needs a story more than food to stay alive.
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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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My faith is in my colleagues. And when I meet other writers, journalists, who’ve been doing this for a long time, trying to make us aware of what it is that we’re living in, I put my faith in those people.
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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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The wolf exerts a powerful influence on the human imagination. It takes your stare and turns it back on you
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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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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?
BARRY LOPEZ