Top 44 Barry Lopez Quotes
#1. One of the things you have to do when you edit your work is make sure that when you use the first person, it's about more than you. We need the story of us.
Barry Lopez
#2. The most intelligent thing we can do is love, not reason.
Barry Lopez
#3. Throughout the centuries we have projected on to the wolf the qualities we most despise and fear in ourselves.
Barry Lopez
#5. I know of no restorative of heart, body, and soul more effective against hopelessness than the restoration of the Earth.
Barry Lopez
#6. 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
#7. To put your hands in a river is to feel the chords that bind the earth together.
Barry Lopez
#8. After you have finished with the stone, the twigs and beetle, other things will suggest themselves, and you must take care of them. I see you are already tired. But you must stay. This is the pain of it all. You can't keep leaving.
Barry Lopez
#9. 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
#10. I feel that my fingers have brushed one of life's deep, coursing threads ... Speak, even notice it, and it would disappear.
Barry Lopez
#11. No culture has yet solved the dilemma each has faced with the growth of a conscious mind: how to live a moral and compassionate existence when one is fully aware of the blood, the horror inherent in all life, when one finds darkness not only in one's own culture but within oneself.
Barry Lopez
#12. We simply do not understand our place in the universe and have not the courage to admit it.
Barry Lopez
#13. There are simply no answers to some of the great pressing questions.
Barry Lopez
#14. All we have is compassion and stories.
Barry Lopez
#15. 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
#17. 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
#18. The attempt to close the gap between what is known and what IS, is the temptation behind the apple in Genesis.
Barry Lopez
#19. Would the last animal, eating garbage and living on the last scrap of land, his mate dead, would he still forgive you?
Barry Lopez
#20. 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
#21. The gaze of the wolf reached into our soul.
Barry Lopez
#22. the world is ever so slightly but uncorrectably out of focus, that there are no absolutely precise answers. Whatever
Barry Lopez
#23. 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
#24. 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
#25. For so many centuries, the exchange of gifts has held us together. It has made it possible to bridge the abyss where language struggles.
Barry Lopez
#26. How do people imagine the landscapes they find themselves in? How does the land shape the imaginations of the people who dwell in it? How does desire itself, the desire to comprehend, shape knowledge?
Barry Lopez
#27. Everything is held together with stories. That is all that is holding us together, stories and compassion.
Barry Lopez
#28. In behaving respectfully toward all that the land contains, it is possible to imagine a stifling ignorance falling away from us.
Barry Lopez
#29. Men of character continued to sail to their death for men of greed.
Barry Lopez
#30. 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
#31. Real beauty is so deep you have to move into darkness to understand it.
Barry Lopez
#32. And one can better understand figures in arctic exploration so obsessed with their own achievement that they found it irksome to acknowledge the Eskimos, unnamed companions, and indefatigable dogs who helped them.
Barry Lopez
#33. One must live in the middle of contradiction, because if all contradiction were eliminated at once life would collapse.
Barry Lopez
#34. Story, as I understood it by reading Faulkner, Hardy, Cather, and Hemingway, was a powerful and clarifying human invention. The language alone, as I discovered it in Gerard Manley Hopkins and Faulkner, was exquisitely beautiful, also weirdly and mysteriously evocative.
Barry Lopez
#35. I would bow slightly with my hands in my pockets, toward the birds and the evidence of life in their nests
because of their fecundity, unexpected in this remote region, and because the serene arctic light that came down over the land like breath, like breathing.
Barry Lopez
#36. 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
#37. The wolf exerts a powerful influence on the human imagination. It takes your stare and turns it back on you
Barry Lopez
#38. 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
#39. 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
#40. 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
#41. To inquire into the intricacies of a distant landscape, then, is to provoke thoughts about one's own interior landscape, and the familiar landscapes of memory. The land urges us to come around to an understanding of ourselves.
Barry Lopez
#42. 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.
Barry Lopez
#43. Sometimes a person needs a story more than food to stay alive.
Barry Lopez
#44. 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
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