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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

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
Sometimes a person needs a story more than food to stay alive.
BARRY LOPEZ

Inspire Needs Story
The land gets inside of us; and we must decide one way or another what this means, what we will do about it.
BARRY LOPEZ

Land Mean Way
I know of no restorative of heart, body, and soul more effective against hopelessness than the restoration of the Earth.
BARRY LOPEZ

Heart Inspirational Soul
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
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

Education Learning Time
To put your hands in a river is to feel the chords that bind the earth together.
BARRY LOPEZ

Hands Nature Rivers
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
Throughout the centuries we have projected on to the wolf the qualities we most despise and fear in ourselves.
BARRY LOPEZ

Century Despise Quality
The opposite of love is not hate; it’s indifference. To be indifferent is to not express love.
BARRY LOPEZ

Hate Love Opposites
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
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
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 LOPEZ

Book Confused Thinking
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

Stories Trying Typewriters
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
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

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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