In behaving respectfully toward all that the land contains, it is possible to imagine a stifling ignorance falling away from us.
BARRY LOPEZMy function as a writer is to provide an atmosphere in which people can think wisely about what we’re doing on this planet.
More Barry Lopez Quotes
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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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One must live in the middle of contradiction, because if all contradiction were eliminated at once life would collapse.
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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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People think that if you’ve written a book and somebody’s given you a pat on the back then, you know, it’s all – you’re all settled, you know? You’re going to be fine. I know that if I’m not confused, and really afraid, my work isn’t going to be any good.
BARRY LOPEZ -
My function as a writer is to provide an atmosphere in which people can think wisely about what we’re doing on this planet.
BARRY LOPEZ -
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.
BARRY LOPEZ -
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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It is the imagination that gives shape to the universe.
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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 most intelligent thing we can do is love, not reason.
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The gaze of the wolf reached into our soul.
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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.
BARRY LOPEZ -
The opposite of love is not hate; it’s indifference. To be indifferent is to not express love.
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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 wolf exerts a powerful influence on the human imagination. It takes your stare and turns it back on you
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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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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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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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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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Throughout the centuries we have projected on to the wolf the qualities we most despise and fear in ourselves.
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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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There are simply no answers to some of the great pressing questions.
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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