We simply do not understand our place in the universe and have not the courage to admit it.
BARRY LOPEZIn behaving respectfully toward all that the land contains, it is possible to imagine a stifling ignorance falling away from us.
More Barry Lopez Quotes
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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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The most intelligent thing we can do is love, not reason.
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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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To put your hands in a river is to feel the chords that bind the earth together.
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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 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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The gaze of the wolf reached into our soul.
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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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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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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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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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Everything is held together with stories. That is all that is holding us together, stories and compassion.
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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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There are simply no answers to some of the great pressing questions.
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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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The land gets inside of us; and we must decide one way or another what this means, what we will do about it.
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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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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 land urges us to come around to an understanding of ourselves.
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real beauty is so deep you have to move into darkness to understand it.
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It is the imagination that gives shape to the universe.
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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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There’s so much to be afraid of.
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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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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.
BARRY LOPEZ