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 LOPEZThere are simply no answers to some of the great pressing questions.
More Barry Lopez Quotes
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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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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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To put your hands in a river is to feel the chords that bind the earth together.
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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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real beauty is so deep you have to move into darkness to understand it.
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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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You continue to live them out, making your life a worthy expression of leaning into the light.
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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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The attempt to close the gap between what is known and what IS, is the temptation behind the apple in Genesis.
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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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There’s so much to be afraid of.
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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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We simply do not understand our place in the universe and have not the courage to admit it.
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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.
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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.
BARRY LOPEZ