Barry Lopez Quotes

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

All we have is compassion and stories.

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

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

I feel that my fingers have brushed one of life's deep, coursing threads ... Speak, even notice it, and it would disappear.

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

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

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

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.

There's so much to be afraid of.

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

The gaze of the wolf reached into our soul.

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

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

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

the world is ever so slightly but uncorrectably out of focus, that there are no absolutely precise answers. Whatever

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

You smell like the woods.

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

Men of character continued to sail to their death for men of greed.

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

For so many centuries, the exchange of gifts has held us together. It has made it possible to bridge the abyss where language struggles.

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

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

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.

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