If there is a stage at which an individual life becomes truly adult, it must be when one grasps the irony in its unfolding and accepts responsibility for a life lived in the midst of such paradox.
BARRY LOPEZHave 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?
More Barry Lopez Quotes
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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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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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One must live in the middle of contradiction, because if all contradiction were eliminated at once life would collapse.
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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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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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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 -
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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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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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.
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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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To put your hands in a river is to feel the chords that bind the earth together.
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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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real beauty is so deep you have to move into darkness to understand it.
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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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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.
BARRY LOPEZ