The land urges us to come around to an understanding of ourselves.
BARRY LOPEZOne must live in the middle of contradiction, because if all contradiction were eliminated at once life would collapse.
More Barry Lopez Quotes
-
-
real beauty is so deep you have to move into darkness to understand it.
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 -
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.
BARRY LOPEZ -
The attempt to close the gap between what is known and what IS, is the temptation behind the apple in Genesis.
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 -
The wolf exerts a powerful influence on the human imagination. It takes your stare and turns it back on 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 -
In behaving respectfully toward all that the land contains, it is possible to imagine a stifling ignorance falling away from us.
BARRY LOPEZ -
Everything is held together with stories. That is all that is holding us together, stories and compassion.
BARRY LOPEZ -
Sometimes a person needs a story more than food to stay alive.
BARRY LOPEZ -
Throughout the centuries we have projected on to the wolf the qualities we most despise and fear in ourselves.
BARRY LOPEZ -
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.
BARRY LOPEZ -
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 -
There are simply no answers to some of the great pressing questions.
BARRY LOPEZ -
There’s so much to be afraid of.
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 -
You continue to live them out, making your life a worthy expression of leaning into the light.
BARRY LOPEZ -
The gaze of the wolf reached into our soul.
BARRY LOPEZ -
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 -
To put your hands in a river is to feel the chords that bind the earth together.
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 -
I know of no restorative of heart, body, and soul more effective against hopelessness than the restoration of the Earth.
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 -
One must live in the middle of contradiction, because if all contradiction were eliminated at once life would collapse.
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 -
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