I know of no restorative of heart, body, and soul more effective against hopelessness than the restoration of the Earth.
BARRY LOPEZThere are simply no answers to some of the great pressing questions.
More Barry Lopez Quotes
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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’s so much to be afraid of.
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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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In behaving respectfully toward all that the land contains, it is possible to imagine a stifling ignorance falling away from us.
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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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One must live in the middle of contradiction, because if all contradiction were eliminated at once life would collapse.
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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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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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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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real beauty is so deep you have to move into darkness to understand it.
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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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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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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 land urges us to come around to an understanding of ourselves.
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It is the imagination that gives shape to the universe.
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We simply do not understand our place in the universe and have not the courage to admit it.
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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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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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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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The most intelligent thing we can do is love, not reason.
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Sometimes a person needs a story more than food to stay alive.
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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 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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The gaze of the wolf reached into our soul.
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To put your hands in a river is to feel the chords that bind the earth together.
BARRY LOPEZ