Barry Lopez Quotes

Story, as I understood it by reading Faulkner, Hardy, Cather, and Hemingway, was a powerful and clar...

Once I was asked be a seatmate on a trans-Pacific flight....what instruction he should give his fift...

It is, I think, the rarest of leisure, hard work mixed with hard pleasure, to refine one's time of d...

Every story is an act of trust between a writer and a reader: each story, in the end, is social. Wha...

All we have is compassion and stories.

I believe in all human societies there is a desire to love and be loved, to experience the full fier...

To inquire into the intricacies of a distant landscape, then, is to provoke thoughts about one’s own...

I remember sitting in this cabin in Alaska one evening reading over the notes of all these encounter...

Why we should believe in wolf children seems somehow easier to understand than the ways we distingui...

I do not know, really, how we will survive without places like the Inner Gorge of the Grand Canyon t...

Occasionally we glimpse the South Rim, four or five thousand feet above. From the rims the canyon se...

A thought that stayed with me was that I had entered a private place in the earth. I had seen expose...

I think of two landscapes- one outside the self, the other within. The external landscape is the one...

Imagine a forty-five-year-old male fifty feet long, a slim, shiny black animal cutting the surface o...

One learns a landscape finally not by knowing the name or identity of everything in it, but by perce...

Because you have seen something doesn't mean you can explain it. Differing interpretations will alwa...

No culture has yet solved the dilemma each has faced with the growth of a conscious mind: how to liv...

Lying there, I thought of my own culture, of the assembly of books in the library at Alexandria; of ...

I watched the enormity of the clouds for several minutes. What I wanted to experience in the water, ...

Over the years, one comes to measure a place, too, not just for the beauty it may give, the balmines...

In Galapagos, as elsewhere, things of the mind, including intellectual ramifications from evolutiona...

Up there in that room, as I see it, is the reading and the thinking-through, a theory of rivers, of ...

The evening before I departed I stood on the rim of a lagoon on Isla Rabida. Flamingos rode on its d...

I could not give up either of these worlds, neither the book I am holding nor the gleaming forest, t...

Stories do not give instruction, they do not explain how to love a companion or how to find God. The...

Something, most certainly, happens to a diver’s emotions underwater. It is not merely a side effect ...

An oceanic expanse of pre-dawn gray white below obscures a checkered grid of Saskatchewan, a snow pl...

For so many centuries, the exchange of gifts has held us together. It has made it possible to bridge...