Barry Lopez Quotes

47 quotes in 827 categories

• 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…
• The land retains an identity of its own, still deeper and more subtle than we can know. Our obligation toward it then becomes simple: to…
• 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…
• One must live in the middle of contradiction, because if all contradiction were eliminated at once life would collapse.
• There are simply no answers to some of the great pressing questions.
• You continue to live them out, making your life a worthy expression of leaning into the light.
• It is the imagination that gives shape to the universe.
• If I were to offer any advice to young writers, it would be this: be discriminating and be discerning about the work you set for…
• 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…
• Over the years, one comes to measure a place, too, not just for the beauty it may give, the balminess of its breezes, the insouciance…
• We simply do not understand our place in the universe and have not the courage to admit it.
• Watching the animals come and go, and feeling the land swell up to meet them and then feeling it grow still at their departure, I…
• 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…
• 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…
• The cold view to take of our future is that we are therefore headed for extinction in a universe of impersonal chemical, physical, and biological…
• The land urges us to come around to an understanding of ourselves.
• In behaving respectfully toward all that the land contains, it is possible to imagine a stifling ignorance falling away from us.
• The land is like poetry:Â Â it is inexplicably coherent, it is transcendent in its meaning, and it has the power to elevate a consideration…
• I know of no restorative of heart, body, and soul more effective against hopelessness than the restoration of the Earth.
• Throughout the centuries we have projected on to the wolf the qualities we most despise and fear in ourselves.

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