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.
BARRY LOPEZWhen 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.
More Barry Lopez Quotes
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Sometimes a person needs a story more than food to stay alive.
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The gaze of the wolf reached into our soul.
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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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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 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 must live in the middle of contradiction, because if all contradiction were eliminated at once life would collapse.
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real beauty is so deep you have to move into darkness to understand it.
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There’s so much to be afraid of.
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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 land urges us to come around to an understanding of ourselves.
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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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Throughout the centuries we have projected on to the wolf the qualities we most despise and fear in ourselves.
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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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You continue to live them out, making your life a worthy expression of leaning into the light.
BARRY LOPEZ