Everything is held together with stories. That is all that is holding us together, stories and compassion.
BARRY LOPEZThe 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.
More Barry Lopez Quotes
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There are simply no answers to some of the great pressing questions.
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My function as a writer is to provide an atmosphere in which people can think wisely about what we’re doing on this planet.
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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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I know of no restorative of heart, body, and soul more effective against hopelessness than the restoration of the Earth.
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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 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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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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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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Throughout the centuries we have projected on to the wolf the qualities we most despise and fear in ourselves.
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There’s so much to be afraid of.
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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.
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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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real beauty is so deep you have to move into darkness to understand it.
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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 most intelligent thing we can do is love, not reason.
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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.
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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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It is the imagination that gives shape to the universe.
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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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We simply do not understand our place in the universe and have not the courage to admit it.
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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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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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The gaze of the wolf reached into our soul.
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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