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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

To put your hands in a river is to feel the chords that bind the earth together.
BARRY LOPEZ

Hands Nature Rivers
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
One must live in the middle of contradiction, because if all contradiction were eliminated at once life would collapse.
BARRY LOPEZ

Contradiction Inspirational Life Middle
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
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

Calling Helping World
The land urges us to come around to an understanding of ourselves.
BARRY LOPEZ

Land Understanding Urges
In behaving respectfully toward all that the land contains, it is possible to imagine a stifling ignorance falling away from us.
BARRY LOPEZ

Fall Ignorance Land
The opposite of love is not hate; it’s indifference. To be indifferent is to not express love.
BARRY LOPEZ

Hate Love Opposites
Would the last animal, eating garbage and living on the last scrap of land, his mate dead, would he still forgive you?
BARRY LOPEZ

Animal Forgiving Land
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
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

Political Rivers Technology
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

Long People Trying
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

Alive Giving Stories
The gaze of the wolf reached into our soul.
BARRY LOPEZ

Gaze Reach Soul Wolf
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
I know of no restorative of heart, body, and soul more effective against hopelessness than the restoration of the Earth.
BARRY LOPEZ

Heart Inspirational Soul

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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Popular Authors

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