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 LOPEZI 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.
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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You continue to live them out, making your life a worthy expression of leaning into the light.
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The land urges us to come around to an understanding of ourselves.
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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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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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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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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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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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One must live in the middle of contradiction, because if all contradiction were eliminated at once life would collapse.
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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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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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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 opposite of love is not hate; it’s indifference. To be indifferent is to not express love.
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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.
BARRY LOPEZ