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

There’s so much to be afraid of. — Barry Lopez

The gaze of the wolf reached into our soul. — Barry Lopez

It is our imagination that gives shape to the universe. — Barry Lopez

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

The land is like poetry: it is inexplicably coherent, it is transcendent in its meaning, and it has the power to elevate a consideration of human life. — Barry Lopez

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

Its only boundary was the horizon, the sill of the sky, separating what the eye could see from what the mind might imagine. — Barry Lopez

The opposite of love is not hate; it’s indifference. To be indifferent is to not express love. — Barry Lopez

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. — Barry Lopez

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

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. — Barry Lopez

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

The land urges us to come around to an understanding of ourselves. — Barry Lopez

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

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

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

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. — Barry Lopez

It is, after all, not man but the universe that is subtle. — Barry Lopez

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

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

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

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

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

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

You continue to live them out, making your life a worthy expression of leaning into the light. — Barry Lopez

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

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? — Barry Lopez

Sometimes a person needs a story more than food to stay alive… from Crow and Weasel — Barry Lopez

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. — Barry Lopez

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

When I sit at that typewriter, I have to be frightened of what I’m trying to do. I’m frightened by my own belief that I can actually get a story down on paper. — Barry Lopez

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 not that I’m not interested–it’s not where I live. I live inside the story. — Barry Lopez

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

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