Quote

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

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Barry Lopez
Age: 75 †
Born: 1945
Born: January 6
Died: 2020
Died: December 25
Author
Photographer
Writer
Port Chester
New York
Barry Holstun Lopez
Even
Roots
Permanence
Much
Illusion
Illusions
Time
Learning
Dry
Education
Passings
Knowledge
Season
Less
Educational
Learn
Seasons
Heralded
Anything
Passing
Cactus

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In behaving respectfully toward all that the land contains, it is possible to imagine a stifling ignorance falling away from us.
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There are simply no answers to some of the great pressing questions.
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The gaze of the wolf reached into our soul.
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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.
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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 approach with an uncalculating mind, with an attitude of regard...be alert for its openings, for that moment when something sacred reveals itself within the mundane, and you know the land knows you are there.
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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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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.
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It is the imagination that gives shape to the universe.
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I know of no restorative of heart, body, and soul more effective against hopelessness than the restoration of the Earth.
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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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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.
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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 came to think of the migrations as breath, as the land breathing. In spring a great inhalation of light and animals. The long-bated breath of summer. And an exhalation that propelled them all south in the fall.
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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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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.
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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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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 wolf exerts a powerful influence on the human imagination. It takes your stare and turns it back on you
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Everything is held together with stories. That is all that is holding us together, stories and compassion.
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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.
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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.
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