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Barry Lopez

Barry Lopez Quotes

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Famous Barry Lopez Quotes

“We keep each other alive with our stories. We need to share them, as much as we need to share food. We also require for our health the presence of good companions. One of the most extraordinary things about the land is that it knows this—and it compels language from some of us so that as a community we may converse about this or that place, and speak of the need.”

KnowsNeedsMayStoriesSpeakLanguageCommunityAliveShareLandExtraordinaryCompanionConversesExtraordinary Things
Author: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.”

KnowsMindStillsMomentsSimpleAttitudeLandIdentityApproachRegardSacredAgingDeeperObligationOpeningSubtleThat MomentMundane
Author:Barry Lopez
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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.”

ThinkingLongStillsFeelingsLightFallGrowsAnimalLandSummerSpringBreathsSouthBreathingComes And GoesDepartureMigration
Book:Arctic Dreams
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“When we enter the landscape to learn something, we are obligated, I think, to pay attention rather than constantly to pose questions. To approach the land as we would a person, by opening an intelligent conversation. And to stay in one place, to make of that one, long observation a fully dilated experience. We will always be rewarded if we give the land credit for more than we imagine, and if we imagine it as being more complex even than language. In these ways we begin, I think, to find a home, to sense how to fit a place.”

IfsThinkingWayGivingPersonsLongHomeLanguageNaturePayAttentionImagineLandFitConversationApproachIntelligentComplexesCreditOpeningObservationLandscapePay AttentionIntelligent Conversation
Author:Barry Lopez
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