Sometimes a person needs a story more than food to stay alive.
BARRY LOPEZWe 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.
More Barry Lopez Quotes
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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.
BARRY LOPEZ -
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 -
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 -
There’s so much to be afraid of.
BARRY LOPEZ -
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 -
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 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 -
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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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 -
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 -
In behaving respectfully toward all that the land contains, it is possible to imagine a stifling ignorance falling away from us.
BARRY LOPEZ -
I know of no restorative of heart, body, and soul more effective against hopelessness than the restoration of the Earth.
BARRY LOPEZ -
Would the last animal, eating garbage and living on the last scrap of land, his mate dead, would he still forgive you?
BARRY LOPEZ -
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.
BARRY LOPEZ -
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