Barry Lopez Quotes

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Everything is held together with stories. That is all that is holding us together, stories and compassion.

The land gets inside of us; and we must decide one way or another what this means, what we will do about it.

real beauty is so deep you have to move into darkness to understand it.

Sometimes a person needs a story more than food to stay alive.

We simply do not understand our place in the universe and have not the courage to admit it.

I know of no restorative of heart, body, and soul more effective against hopelessness than the restoration of the Earth.

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.

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?

The wolf exerts a powerful influence on the human imagination. It takes your stare and turns it back on you

Throughout the centuries we have projected on to the wolf the qualities we most despise and fear in ourselves.

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.

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

It is the imagination that gives shape to the universe.

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

The most intelligent thing we can do is love, not reason.

The opposite of love is not hate; it's indifference. To be indifferent is to not express love.

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

The land urges us to come around to an understanding of ourselves.

My function as a writer is to provide an atmosphere in which people can think wisely about what we're doing on this planet.

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.

The attempt to close the gap between what is known and what IS, is the temptation behind the apple in Genesis.

There are simply no answers to some of the great pressing questions.

There's so much to be afraid of.

You continue to live them out, making your life a worthy expression of leaning into the light.

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.

The gaze of the wolf reached into our soul.

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.