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
Much
Illusion
Illusions
Time
Learning
Dry
Education
Passings
Knowledge
Season
Less
Educational
Learn
Seasons
Heralded
Anything
Passing
Cactus
Even
Roots
Permanence

More quotes by Barry Lopez

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I know of no restorative of heart, body, and soul more effective against hopelessness than the restoration of the Earth.
Barry Lopez
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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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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.
Barry Lopez
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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.
Barry Lopez
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The gaze of the wolf reached into our soul.
Barry Lopez
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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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It is the imagination that gives shape to the universe.
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There are simply no answers to some of the great pressing questions.
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There's so much to be afraid of.
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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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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 yourself. That done, be the untutored traveler, the eager reader, the enthusiastic listener. Put what you learn together carefully, and then write thoughtfully, with respect both for the reader and your sources.
Barry Lopez
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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.
Barry Lopez
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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
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Everything is held together with stories. That is all that is holding us together, stories and compassion.
Barry Lopez
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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.
Barry Lopez
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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.
Barry Lopez
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One must live in the middle of contradiction, because if all contradiction were eliminated at once life would collapse.
Barry Lopez
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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.
Barry Lopez
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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.
Barry Lopez