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 LOPEZWould the last animal, eating garbage and living on the last scrap of land, his mate dead, would he still forgive you?
More Barry Lopez Quotes
-
-
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 -
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 -
In behaving respectfully toward all that the land contains, it is possible to imagine a stifling ignorance falling away from us.
BARRY LOPEZ -
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.
BARRY LOPEZ -
real beauty is so deep you have to move into darkness to understand it.
BARRY LOPEZ -
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 -
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 -
There’s so much to be afraid of.
BARRY LOPEZ -
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.
BARRY LOPEZ -
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 -
It is the imagination that gives shape to the universe.
BARRY LOPEZ -
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 -
Sometimes a person needs a story more than food to stay alive.
BARRY LOPEZ -
One must live in the middle of contradiction, because if all contradiction were eliminated at once life would collapse.
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