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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.

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

Fall Ignorance Land
real beauty is so deep you have to move into darkness to understand it.
BARRY LOPEZ

Darkness Moving Real
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
The gaze of the wolf reached into our soul.
BARRY LOPEZ

Gaze Reach Soul Wolf
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 LOPEZ

Animal Blood Eerie
One must live in the middle of contradiction, because if all contradiction were eliminated at once life would collapse.
BARRY LOPEZ

Contradiction Inspirational Life Middle
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
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
Everything is held together with stories. That is all that is holding us together, stories and compassion.
BARRY LOPEZ

Compassion Heart Love
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

Adults Inspirational Life Responsibility
The attempt to close the gap between what is known and what IS, is the temptation behind the apple in Genesis.
BARRY LOPEZ

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

Century Despise Quality
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
There are simply no answers to some of the great pressing questions.
BARRY LOPEZ

Answers Inspirational Life
The most intelligent thing we can do is love, not reason.
BARRY LOPEZ

Intelligence Love Reason

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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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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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