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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

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 LOPEZ

Atmosphere People Thinking
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

Political Rivers Technology
There’s so much to be afraid of.
BARRY LOPEZ

Afraid Ashamed Much
The most intelligent thing we can do is love, not reason.
BARRY LOPEZ

Intelligence Love Reason
To put your hands in a river is to feel the chords that bind the earth together.
BARRY LOPEZ

Hands Nature Rivers
Everything is held together with stories. That is all that is holding us together, stories and compassion.
BARRY LOPEZ

Compassion Heart Love
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

Alive Giving Stories
We simply do not understand our place in the universe and have not the courage to admit it.
BARRY LOPEZ

Admit Courage Place Universe
The wolf exerts a powerful influence on the human imagination. It takes your stare and turns it back on you
BARRY LOPEZ

Imagination Influence Powerful
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
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
real beauty is so deep you have to move into darkness to understand it.
BARRY LOPEZ

Darkness Moving Real
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
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

Character Land Mind
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 urges us to come around to an understanding of ourselves.
BARRY LOPEZ

Land Understanding Urges

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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Popular Authors

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

More Barry Lopez Quotes