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 LOPEZThere are simply no answers to some of the great pressing questions.
More Barry Lopez Quotes
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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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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.
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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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To put your hands in a river is to feel the chords that bind the earth together.
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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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We simply do not understand our place in the universe and have not the courage to admit it.
BARRY LOPEZ -
real beauty is so deep you have to move into darkness to understand it.
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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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Throughout the centuries we have projected on to the wolf the qualities we most despise and fear in ourselves.
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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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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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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?
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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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There are simply no answers to some of the great pressing questions.
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