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 LOPEZThe wolf exerts a powerful influence on the human imagination. It takes your stare and turns it back on you
More Barry Lopez Quotes
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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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Throughout the centuries we have projected on to the wolf the qualities we most despise and fear in ourselves.
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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 are simply no answers to some of the great pressing questions.
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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 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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The most intelligent thing we can do is love, not reason.
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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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It is the imagination that gives shape to the universe.
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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.
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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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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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Sometimes a person needs a story more than food to stay alive.
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Everything is held together with stories. That is all that is holding us together, stories and compassion.
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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