Everything is held together with stories. That is all that is holding us together, stories and compassion.
BARRY LOPEZThe land urges us to come around to an understanding of ourselves.
More Barry Lopez Quotes
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It is the imagination that gives shape to the universe.
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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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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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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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There’s so much to be afraid of.
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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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You continue to live them out, making your life a worthy expression of leaning into the light.
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The land urges us to come around to an understanding of ourselves.
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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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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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I know of no restorative of heart, body, and soul more effective against hopelessness than the restoration of the Earth.
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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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There are simply no answers to some of the great pressing questions.
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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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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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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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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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To put your hands in a river is to feel the chords that bind the earth together.
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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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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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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 opposite of love is not hate; it’s indifference. To be indifferent is to not express love.
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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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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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