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It is the imagination that gives shape to the universe.

Barry Lopez

Throughout the centuries we have projected on to the wolf the qualities we most despise and fear in ourselves.
BARRY LOPEZ

Century Despise Quality
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

Political Rivers Technology
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

Atmosphere People Thinking
The wolf exerts a powerful influence on the human imagination. It takes your stare and turns it back on you
BARRY LOPEZ

Imagination Influence Powerful
For so many centuries, the exchange of gifts has held us together. It has made it possible to bridge the abyss where language struggles.
BARRY LOPEZ

Inspirational Motivational Struggle
real beauty is so deep you have to move into darkness to understand it.
BARRY LOPEZ

Darkness Moving Real
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.
BARRY LOPEZ

Long People Trying
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.
BARRY LOPEZ

Animal Doe Men
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.
BARRY LOPEZ

Alive Giving Stories
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.
BARRY LOPEZ

Education Learning Time
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.
BARRY LOPEZ

Looks Stories Writing
Would the last animal, eating garbage and living on the last scrap of land, his mate dead, would he still forgive you?
BARRY LOPEZ

Animal Forgiving Land
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.
BARRY LOPEZ

Dream Nature Regret
Sometimes a person needs a story more than food to stay alive.
BARRY LOPEZ

Inspire Needs Story
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

Consideration Human Land Life
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.
BARRY LOPEZ

Character Land Mind

It is the imagination that gives shape to the universe.

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It is the imagination that gives shape to the universe.

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