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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To put your hands in a river is to feel the chords that bind the earth together.
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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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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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There are simply no answers to some of the great pressing questions.
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The most intelligent thing we can do is love, not reason.
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It is the imagination that gives shape to the universe.
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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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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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Everything is held together with stories. That is all that is holding us together, stories and compassion.
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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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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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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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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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We cannot, of course, save the World because we do not have authority over its parts. We can serve the world though. That is everyone’s calling, to lead a life that helps.
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The land urges us to come around to an understanding of ourselves.
BARRY LOPEZ