Barry Lopez
Barry Lopez
Barry Holstun Lopezis an American author, essayist, and fiction writer whose work is known for its humanitarian and environmental concerns. He won the National Book Award for Nonfiction for Arctic Dreams and his Of Wolves and Menwas a National Book Award finalist...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionAuthor
Date of Birth6 January 1945
CountryUnited States of America
powerful imagination influence
The wolf exerts a powerful influence on the human imagination. It takes your stare and turns it back on you
views law may
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 laws. A more productive, certainly more engaging view, is that we have the intelligence to grasp what is happening, the composure not to be intimidated by its complexity, and the courage to take steps that may bear no fruit in our lifetimes.
quality century despise
Throughout the centuries we have projected on to the wolf the qualities we most despise and fear in ourselves.
mean diverse-society space
Because you have seen something doesn't mean you can explain it. Differing interpretations will always abound, even when good minds come to bear. The kernel of indisputable information is a dot in space; interpretations grow out of the desire to make this point a line, to give it direction. The directions in which it can be sent, the uses to which it can be put by a culturally, professionally, and geographically diverse society are almost without limit. The possibilities make good scientists chary.
expression light excellence
One must live in the middle of contradiction, because if all contradiction were eliminated at once, life would collapse. There are simply no definitive 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.
heart soul restoration
I know of no restorative of heart, body, and soul more effective against hopelessness than the restoration of the Earth.
years giving sublime
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 and relaxation it encourages, the sublime pleasures it offers, but for what it teaches. The way in which it alters our perception of the human. It is not so much that you want to return to indifferent or difficult places, but that you want to not forget.
mean land way
The land gets inside of us; and we must decide one way or another what this means, what we will do about it.
order giving imagination
To allow mystery, which is to say to yourself, 'There could be more...things we don't understand,' is not to damn knowledge....It is to permit yourself an extraordinary, freedom: someone else does not have to be wrong in order that you might be right...This tolerance for mystery invigorates the imagination; and it is the imagination that gives shape to the universe.
technology rivers political
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?
real moving darkness
real beauty is so deep you have to move into darkness to understand it.
universe
We simply do not understand our place in the universe and have not the courage to admit it.
calling world helping
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.
attitude simple land
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.