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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.

Barry Lopez

It is the imagination that gives shape to the universe.
BARRY LOPEZ

Giving Imagination Wise
The gaze of the wolf reached into our soul.
BARRY LOPEZ

Gaze Reach Soul Wolf
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 LOPEZ

Adults Inspirational Life Responsibility
You continue to live them out, making your life a worthy expression of leaning into the light.
BARRY LOPEZ

Expression Inspirational Life Light
Throughout the centuries we have projected on to the wolf the qualities we most despise and fear in ourselves.
BARRY LOPEZ

Century Despise Quality
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

Consideration Human Land Life
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

Looks Stories Writing
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

Character Land Mind
real beauty is so deep you have to move into darkness to understand it.
BARRY LOPEZ

Darkness Moving Real
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

Animal Blood Eerie
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.
BARRY LOPEZ

Book Confused Thinking
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

Education Learning Time
Sometimes a person needs a story more than food to stay alive.
BARRY LOPEZ

Inspire Needs Story
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

Land Mean Way
Everything is held together with stories. That is all that is holding us together, stories and compassion.
BARRY LOPEZ

Compassion Heart Love
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

Animal Doe Men

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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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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