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 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.
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.
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The land urges us to come around to an understanding of ourselves.
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real beauty is so deep you have to move into darkness to understand it.
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There’s so much to be afraid of.
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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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The most intelligent thing we can do is love, not reason.
BARRY LOPEZ -
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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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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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.
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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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Throughout the centuries we have projected on to the wolf the qualities we most despise and fear in 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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Everything is held together with stories. That is all that is holding us together, stories and compassion.
BARRY LOPEZ